Mass Killings Can Haunt Elephants for Decades (from Wired)

Effing dumbass humans. Just because a creature doesn't look and sound like we do does not mean they lack feelings, emotions, and memories.

From Wired, via ScienceNOW.

Mass Killings Can Haunt Elephants for Decades

By Virginia Morell, ScienceNOW
11.04.13




Image: Graeme Shannon
African elephants that have lived through the trauma of a cull—or selected killing of their kin—may look normal enough to the casual observer, but socially they are a mess. That’s the conclusion of a new study, the first to show that human activities can disrupt the social skills of large-brained mammals that live in complex societies for decades. The finding, experts say, has implications for conservation management, which often solely focuses on the number of animals in a population, and may extend to chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, and other species.

“It is a groundbreaking study, because it is the first to demonstrate, experimentally, a direct connection between the effects of culling and specific psychosocial harms,” says Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and expert on dolphin behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved with the research. “It shows unequivocally that elephants are psychologically damaged by culling.”

Wildlife officials often used culling as a conservation tool in South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s. (It is still reserved as a management tool there.) At the time, wildlife managers worried that if there were too many elephants in a fenced reserve, like the famed Kruger National Park, the behemoths would ultimately destroy the habitat, eating or trampling all the vegetation and uprooting the trees. During a cull, a helicopter pilot herds an elephant family into a tight bunch. Professional hunters on the ground then shoot the animals as quickly as possible. Only young elephants ranging from about 4 to 10 years old are saved. Park officials typically shipped them to other parks that lacked elephants or had smaller populations to increase the herds, because elephants are popular with tourists.

“Some of these elephants ended up in Pilanesberg National Park,” in South Africa’s North West Province where part of the new study was carried out, says Graeme Shannon, a behavioral ecologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and the lead author of the new study. “Twenty to 30 years have passed since the actual cull and relocation.”

Scientists have known since the late 1990s that many of these elephants were psychologically affected by their experiences during the culling. Other studies have described these effects as akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. For instance, the orphaned male elephants at Pilanesberg and another reserve made headlines for attacking and killing 107 rhinoceroses over a 10-year period, something that elephants had never been reported to do. Other researchers who study male elephants attributed the young males’ abnormal behavior to their surging hormones and lack of social learning—both of which were controlled after older male elephants were introduced. In some instances, the orphaned female elephants were also hyperaggressive and attacked tourist vehicles. But they, too, apparently recovered and went on to form family groups, although these groups sometimes include unrelated individuals, which is unusual in elephants.

“On the surface, they look like they’re now getting on okay,” says Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and a co-author of the study. “But we found a way to go deeper into their minds, and that’s how we found the deficits in the social decisions that they make.”

From studies of the relatively undisturbed population of elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, scientists know that social learning is important to these animals. In their family groups, the oldest female is the guiding matriarch, and she passes on to younger members behaviors such as how to greet family members and how to react to the calls of strange females.

The researchers compared the reactions of 14 Pilanesberg elephant families and 39 elephant families in Amboseli to different levels of social threats. For each test, they positioned their Land Rover 100 meters away from a family group and broadcast an elephant’s deep-throated greeting call for 10 to 20 seconds. The calls were from familiar or unfamiliar elephants or were resynthesized calls that were made to sound like individuals of specific age classes. (You can listen to examples here.) These tests gauged the elephants’ ability to make the best decision when faced with what could be a major threat: an older, dominant, strange female. Such animals can pose a danger to a family by forcing them, for instance, to leave areas where they are feeding, McComb says.

The scientists video-recorded the families’ reactions to the various calls and measured certain key behaviors, such as whether the elephants defensively bunched together, whether they listened and smelled for the stranger, and how much time they spent doing these activities.

When the researchers played the calls to the Amboseli elephants, almost every family responded appropriately to the rumbles of the older, unfamiliar female. Typically, the entire family froze in place. The members raised their ears to listen and their trunks to sniff for the invader. They turned toward the vehicle and bunched together, forming a fortress of elephant flesh with the matriarch in front. Sometimes, they charged past the scientist’s vehicle, searching for the alien hussy. “You get the feeling they really know what they’re doing,” McComb says. “They have very coordinated responses.”

In contrast, the Pilanesberg elephants never seemed to know what to do. “The pattern there was no pattern at all; their reactions were completely random,” McComb says. In one extreme instance, a family left the area at once, traveling more than a kilometer before they came to a halt—but they did so in response to the call of an elephant they all knew. “Yet when they heard the call of the older, strange female, they did nothing at all; they just stayed completely relaxed,” Shannon says.

“You might think because of their history that they were just more accepting of strangers,” McComb says. “But it wasn’t that. They simply failed at picking out the calls of older, socially dominant animals.”

Because the Pilanesberg elephants grew up without the social knowledge of their original families, they will likely never properly respond to social threats and may even pass on their inappropriate behaviors to the next generation, the team concludes in the current issue of Frontiers in Zoology. And it may be that elephant populations that are heavily poached or otherwise adversely affected by human activities are similarly socially damaged, they say.

All of this matters because poor decision-making can affect the elephants’ reproductive success, McComb says. A previous study that she and others carried out in Amboseli compared the decision-making abilities of younger and older matriarchs. Those families led by the oldest individuals with the most experience also had the most calves. Exactly how the poor decisions of the Pilanesberg elephants will affect them in the future is as yet unknown. “What we now know is that their social understanding is most certainly impaired,” McComb says.

The team’s findings “may also apply to other species, such as cetaceans and nonhuman primates” that have been and, in some cases, continue to be heavily managed, Marino says. They also show “unequivocally that conservation that is only based on numbers,” that is, on how many animals are in a population, “and which does not take into account the individual ends in disaster.”

Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, adds: “It is difficult to not conclude that the legal killing or illegal poaching of elephants is not only inhumane, it is barbaric.”

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Caitrin Nicol - Do Elephants Have Souls?

Here is an excellent article from The New Atlantis on the lives and too frequent deaths of elephants, one of the more remarkable creatures on the planet in terms of intelligence, emotional range, and social dynamics. This article asks if elephants have souls?

I guess that depends on how you define "soul" . . . .

“Big ears” by Emmanuel Keller; altered with permission (CC BY-ND 2.0).

Do Elephants Have Souls?

Caitrin Nicol

There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. 

—Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born

The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life.

After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. Over time, with practice and guidance, it will find the potential in this appendage flailing off its face to breathe, drink, caress, thwack, probe, lift, haul, wrap, spray, sense, blast, stroke, smell, nudge, collect, bathe, toot, wave, and perform countless other functions that a person would rely on a combination of eyes, nose, hands, and strong machinery to do.

Welcome to the world: This newborn hasn’t yet stood up and stretched its legs, let alone figured out how to use its trunk.“Elephant Nature Park” by Christian Haugen (CC BY 2.0). 

Once the calf is weaned from its mother’s milk at five or whenever its next sibling is born, it will spend up to 16 hours a day eating 5 percent of its entire weight in leaves, grass, brush, bark, and basically any other kind of vegetation. It will only process about 40 percent of the nutrients in this food, however; the waste it leaves behind helps fertilize plant growth and provide accessible nutrition on the ground to smaller animals, thus making the elephant a keystone species in its habitat. From 250 pounds at birth, it will continue to grow throughout its life, to up to 7 tons for a male of the largest species or 4 tons for a female.

Of the many types of elephants and mammoths that used to roam the earth, one born today will belong to one of three surviving species: Elephas maximus in Asia, Loxodonta africana (savanna elephant) or Loxodonta cyclotis (forest elephant) in Africa. There are about 500,000 African elephants alive now (about a third of them the more reticent, less studied L. cyclotis), and only 40,000 – 50,000 Asian elephants remaining. The Swedish Elephant Encyclopedia database currently lists just under 5,000 (most of them E. maximus) living in captivity worldwide, in half as many locations — meaning that the average number of elephants per holding is less than two; many of them live without a single companion of their kind.

For the freeborn, if it is a cow, the “allomothers” who welcomed her into the world will be with her for life — a matriarchal clan led by the oldest and biggest. She in turn will be an enthusiastic caretaker and playmate to her younger cousins and siblings. When she is twelve or fourteen, she will go into heat (“estrus”) for the first time, a bewildering occurrence during which her mother will stand by and show her what to do and which male to accept. If she conceives, she will have a calf twenty-two months later, crucially aided in birthing and raising it by the more experienced older ladies. She may have another every four to five years into her fifties or sixties, but not all will survive.

If it is a bull, he will stay with his family until the age of ten or twelve, when his increasingly rough and suggestive play will cause him to be sent off. He may loosely join forces with a few other young males, or trail around after older ones he looks up to, but for the most part he will be independent from then on. Within the next few years he will start going into “musth,” a periodic state of excitation characterized by surging levels of testosterone, dribbling urine and copious secretions from his temporal glands, and extreme aggression responsive only to the presence of a bigger bull, who has an immediate dominance that the young male risks injury or death by failing to defer to. Although he reaches sexual maturity at a fairly young age, thanks to the competition he may not sire any children until he is close to thirty. (Ancient Indian poetry lauds bulls in musth for their amorous powers, even as keepers of Asian elephants have respected the phase as one highly dangerous to humans since time immemorial. Until 1976, it was widely believed in the scientific community that African elephants do not enter musth. This changed when researchers at Amboseli National Park in Kenya were dismayed to note an epidemic of “Green Penis Syndrome,” which they feared signaled some horrible venereal disease — until they realized it was nothing more nor less alarming than the very definition of a force of nature.)

Other than this primal temporary madness, elephants (when they do not feel threatened) are quite peaceable, with a gentle, loyal, highly social nature. Here is how John Donne, having seen one at a London exposition in 1612, put it:

Natures great master-peece, an Elephant,
The onely harmlesse great thing; the giant
Of beasts; who thought, no more had gone, to make one wise
But to be just, and thankfull, loth to offend,
(Yet nature hath given him no knees to bend)
Himselfe he up-props, on himselfe relies,
And foe to none, suspects no enemies.

Donne is not the first or the last to view the elephant in its stature and dignity as a synecdoche for the total grandeur of the universe, come to earth in lumpen grey form. Here he suggests that it represents a moral ideal as well. Animals are often celebrated for virtues that they seem to embody: dogs for loyalty, bears for courage, dolphins for altruism, and so on. But what does it really mean for them to model these things? When people act virtuously, we give them credit for well-chosen behavior. Animals, it is presumed, do so without choosing.

From a religious, anthropocentric perspective, it might be said that while animal virtues do not entail morality for the animals themselves, they reveal to us the goodness in creation; as the medieval theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena wrote, “In a wonderful and inexpressible way God is created in His creatures.” From a more biological view, it might be noted that people mostly do not choose their dispositions either, that behavioral tendencies are more determined than we like to tell ourselves, and that blame and credit for such things are often misapplied in human contexts too.

But the latter idea — that humans, although capable of conscious self-direction, are as mutely carried along by the force of selection as your friendly neighborhood amoeba — simply elides the question, while the former raises many more; the tiger is as much God’s creature as the lamb. In any case, the capacity for “choosing” is a binary conceit that gestures at something much fuller, an inner realm of awareness, selfhood, and possibility. In other words, a soul.

To the ancients, soul was anima, that which animates, the living-, moving-, breathing-ness of a biological being. In this sense, not only animals but plants have souls (of different capacities appropriate to what they are). For many religions, by contrast, the soul is specifically incorporeal, perhaps immortal, and believed to be unique to human beings, who are responsible (to a point) for its condition. To modern science it is, if anything, the hard problem of consciousness, also commonly thought to be the province of just one species.

Without either choosing sides or somehow reconciling these three dueling realities with each other, it would be impossible to say what a soul is, let alone who has one. But there is a fourth sense in which when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved. Even if, religiously, we know by revelation that other people possess them for eternity, we only engage with or know anything about them at a quotidian level by way of the same cues and interactions that a more this-worldly view would take as their sum total: bright eyes, a dejected slump, a sudden manic inspiration or a confession of regret.

Also a matter of conventional wisdom is the idea that human beings are on one side of a great divide while all animals are on the other, subjects of their instincts and our necessities and pleasures. What exactly the divide is, though, is difficult to define. Various contestants have included reason, language, art, technology, religion, walking upright and the use of hands, knowledge of mortality, sin, suicide, and more. In The Explicit Animal (1991), Raymond Tallis rounds up a master list of them:

Man has called himself (among other things): the rational animal; the moral animal; the consciously choosing animal; the deliberately evil animal; the political animal; the toolmaking animal; the historical animal; the commodity-making animal; the economical animal; the foreseeing animal; the promising animal; the death-knowing animal; the art-making or aesthetic animal; the explaining animal; the cause-bearing animal; the classifying animal; the measuring animal; the counting animal; the metaphor-making animal; the talking animal; the laughing animal; the religious animal; the spiritual animal; the metaphysical animal; the wondering animal... Man, it seems, is the self-predicating animal.

As Tallis goes on to explain, any given one of those distinctions is both too narrow, in being an insufficient explanation of what makes human beings human, and too open, in being demonstrably shared to some extent by another species.

Chimpanzees and other large primates, for instance, are so intelligent and personable that they blur many of these boundaries. But since we are so closely connected evolutionarily, it is easy to tacitly view them as way stations toward the human apex, impoverished versions of ourselves rather than somebody in their own right. There is, however, nothing else remotely like an elephant. (Its closest living relatives are sea cows — dugongs and manatees — and the hyrax, an African shrewmouse about the size of a rabbit.) As such, it presents the perfect opportunity for thoughtful reconsideration of the human difference, and how much that difference really matters.

Read the whole, long article, which is very worth your time.

Metanexus - The Evolution of Personality

From Metanexus, this article is adapted from Raymond Neubauer's new book, Evolution and the Emergent Self: The Rise of Complexity and Behavioral Versatility in Nature. Neubauer looks at chimpanzees, dolphins, corvids (mainly ravens and crows), and elephants for the ways that their differing evolutionary histories have produced some similar cognitive and behavioral skills.

The Evolution of Personality

January 19, 2012

By Raymond L. Neubauer

In my book, Evolution and the Emergent Self, I examine four animal groups with high relative brain size (high brain weight in comparison to body weight), and find that they have a variety of qualities in common even though they have very different evolutionary histories and live in different environments: chimpanzees, dolphins, corvids (mainly ravens and crows), and elephants. There is a remarkable convergence of behavior: They all have long-term relationships and complex societies with "politics" in which two or more individuals may form alliances against others. They appear to consider what others are thinking and can form flexible plans of deception. Hunting can involve different roles for different members that are coordinated with each other. They have complex communication with the possibility of understanding syntax in learned instructions.

Each of these species has a long period of juvenile dependency that allows for a slowly maturing nervous system that is capable of flexibility and innovation into the adult years. The variability of learning creates individual differences between members of a species and local cultural differences between groups. There is insight learning that finds quick solutions to novel problems faster than we would expect from trial and error alone.

At one level, we can simply say a more complex nervous system leads to more complex behavior. But I go further and suggest that there is an emergent self that seeks to express itself in more complex communication and social relationships, and values others of its kind more fully as individuals than do species with smaller relative brain size. We see this in long-term relationships, in what looks like mourning at the death of a conspecific, in helping behavior toward non-relatives, and in forming higher order coalitions in society. Evidence of mirror self-recognition in all four groups fits this picture of an emergent self that views itself and others with greater objectivity.

This emergent self also expresses itself in intricate manipulation of its environment. Each species has high dexterity, but the appendage employed varies widely due to their different evolutionary origins, from a hand to a beak, a trunk, or a flipper. What is constant is a large brain that is expressing itself.

This large brain also appears capable of abstraction. Each of these species is skilled at mimicry, and it could be argued that this involves a concept of the other that serves as a model. It suggests that there is a mental representation of some part of the model, such as its voice or movements, that the individual is trying to match. There also appear to be mental representations in tool making. The termite fishing sticks of chimpanzees and the leaf tools of the New Caledonian crows are made to standardized sizes that suggest preset concepts of length and width. They may then be carried long distances where they are just the right dimensions for the task at hand. This suggests a mental representation of both tool form and the goal of its use.

An emergent self sees with greater objectivity, and it can mix and match categories with high flexibility. It can combine tools in novel ways and formulate new alliances in social life. It seems to view itself with greater objectivity, as evidenced by mirror self-recognition. I suggest a physical basis for this greater objectivity in the hierarchical arrangement of circuits in a large brain. We now know that the brain is modular, with specific areas devoted to specific functions like facial recognition or short-term memory. Animals with high brain-body ratios have more modules that can be devoted to functions beyond just physiological control. A hierarchical arrangement of these modules may lead to higher derivatives from the raw data, resulting in higher levels of objectivity.

Brains as well as genes can store information, and I suggest information content may be the defining quality that distinguishes two paradigm strategies of life. Organisms of high information content in genes or brains take longer to develop for the basic reason that complex things take longer to build than simple things. They have versatility of response built into the individual and can deal with a variety of fluctuations in the environment. They have many of the characteristics of species known in ecology as K- selected: small litters with slow development of the young, allowing a long period for learning, and fairly steady population numbers since individuals have a variety of skills to cope with change.

Organisms of lower information content in genes or brains tend to develop more quickly and are known in ecology as r-selected, opportunistic species. There is less parental investment per individual, but more are produced. They have shorter, less flexible programs, and many individuals may be sacrificed to find the combinations best suited to match new conditions. These individuals can quickly take over an environment so that populations go through characteristic “boom and bust” cycles.

Humans rely on an extreme form of a strategy found repeatedly in nature—the accumulation of information to increase the versatility of response to a changing environment. Programs are encoded not only in genes and brains, but in languages, books, and computers. Our current dominance on the planet, both for good and for ill, testifies to the power of information for mastery over nature. In this sense, human culture is not an anomaly, but an extension of K-selected strategies found repeatedly in nature. It might even be suggested that a species like us is inevitable if the evolutionary process is given enough time to run. All of nature is not laboring toward greater complexity because short programs with quick development are an alternative way of dealing with change. But it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that given the right conditions and enough time, a species like us is in the cards, and the seeds of consciousness are planted within the evolutionary process.

Adapted from Evolution and the Emergent Self by Raymond L. Neubauer. Copyright (c) 2012 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.