Elephant Funeral

This week, The Economist published an article entitled 'Elephant empathy'. If you find this article interesting, I would highly recommend research published in Nature entitled 'Elephant breakdown' by G.A. Bradshaw et al. It discusses in greater detail the complexity of the elephant mind. Here is 'Elephant empathy':

Elephants, proverbially, never forget. This photograph suggests that they may even remember their dead. It comes from a paper about to be published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a Kenyan zoologist, and his colleagues. The question of whether intelligent mammals such as elephants have similar emotional reactions to those of people is much debated in zoological circles. Mr Douglas-Hamilton's researchers were able to observe the reaction of other elephants to the death of Eleanor, the matriarch of a group called the First Ladies. The picture shows an elephant from a neighbouring group pulling at her body. On several occasions before she died, other elephants had tried to help her stand up. Such behaviour is in contrast to that shown by most animals to sick or dead individuals. They just ignore them.