Rare Footage: Wild Elephants “Mourn” Their Dead | National Geographic

I was pretty amazed by this scene when we came across it. You know, you do hear these stories about elephants showing this really keen interest in dead bodies of their species, and it's just a very hard thing to observe. So, to find a body to begin with is not that easy.

Then, to be able to witness what happens afterwards, where you have these other elephants exploring the body, is an extremely rare event. We found this group of elephants; they were kind of a resting group. They were all bunched together, and as they started to disperse, we found that their matriarch died. She was an old female; she was estimated to be about 55 years old at the time that she died.

The video that we're looking at is 2 to 3 weeks after she died. At that point, you can tell that the body is kind of decayed a little bit, and predators have been on it, so most of the meat has been taken off. But the elephants that were there that day in that spot were still really interested in her body. We're seeing a lot of exploration, and you can see that these elephants are kind of holding their trunks out and smelling the body.

There's a young male called Omata who is picking up her dried ear and kind of exploring inside her skull, really investigating. Then, the other thing that I was just really amazed by was how much standing around there was. You know, elephants don't waste a lot of time in terms of feeding.

I mean, they have to feed for about 20 hours a day just to get all the nutrients that they need, but they were just standing there. They weren't resting, but they were just kind of standing. I thought that was really interesting. If you look for it, you can see that some of the elephants have streaming from their temporal glands.

These are glands behind their eyes that will stream temper when they have sort of elevated levels of emotion. You see them do it when they're excited, or you see them do it when they're really stressed. The interesting thing is that, you know, the video that we're looking at—those are not her relatives at all. She knew them; those were other elephants in the population that also inhabited that area a lot.

I don't know if elephants mourn. When I think of mourning, I think of that as a term that I only know really applied to humans. You know, if a person I know loses somebody in their life, I can ask them how they're feeling, and they can tell me about grief. I can't do that with an elephant, so it's very hard to know if they mourn in the same way that we mourn.

They're very different animals from us, but one thing that we do know is that they have extremely strong social bonds, which is very similar to humans. We see them exhibit these behaviors at dead bodies that they don't exhibit otherwise.

So, there's certainly something going on there, whether it's mourning—I can't say—but it's certainly an interest in their dead. Look at these guys. How could you harm these guys? To spend time with these baby elephants is just... it recharges your soul.

To have them lead me into a group of wild elephants and to be chaperoned, they are protecting me whether they know it or not.