Empathy
A story a couple of years ago reporting on research that suggests elephants comfort each other.
Credit: Elise Gilchrist Copyright: Think Elephants International, Inc. CC BY SA
Asian elephants reassure other distressed elephants by touching them and “talking” to them, which suggests they are capable of empathy and reassurance, according to new research.
…The researchers found that when “an elephant would show distress, the other elephants would adopt that same state — and we call that “emotional contagion” — which is something you typically see in an empathic reaction,” Plotnik said.
Then, the elephants would move toward each other, touch each other’s faces and genitals, and put their trunks in each other’s mouths and chirp, he said.
They do.
There was this thing Sri, the youngest elephant at our zoo did – she was two when I started working there, a year younger than Chai. Little kids, both of them, but Chai was considerably bigger than Sri. Sri would curl her trunk up against Chai’s side, in the position she would have used if she’d been nursing. It always gave me a pang…but Chai was a good substitute-mother to her. Neither of them ever did that to either of the adults.
On YouTube:
Herd of Elephants Help an Elephant Calf After Collapsing in the Road (2:15)