What elephants can teach us about life | BBC Ideas

0:04 Elephants are so different from us anatomically that you would think there would be very few parallels, and yet the more we learn about elephant society the more parallels we see. They seem to have very strong social bonds. Females stay in their family groups their whole lives. And the males will stay in their family group until they become teenagers, and then they will move out and they will hang out with other males in what's known as a bachelor herd. The calves get raised by their relatives as well as their mum. So sisters, brothers, aunties, cousins, grandma all contribute to the raising of the calf, much like we used to.

0:50 Elephants are really amazing at staying in touch. Elephants will communicate with each other using vocalisations, making sounds that are within human hearing range, but we know that they also use something called infrasound which is a very low-frequency sound. And the thing about infrasound is that it travels over very long distances, it can travel many miles. And so we believe that elephants, when they separate from each other in groups, that they will keep in touch with each other using infrasound and they will use that to coordinate their movements with each other, eventually meeting back up together again. For us in the Western world, and in big cities with so many people, loneliness is a problem, is a massive social illness.

1:35 The behaviour of elephants suggests that they are aware of death and that they do grieve and show emotion when members of their family die. And they also show interest in the remains of elephants that they might not have known. And I quote someone called Kyle Owens, who was working in Burkina Faso in 1986. He witnessed a remarkable scene while watching a herd of eight elephants with a tiny baby. He saw that the baby was ill, and throughout the morning, the mother tried everything to raise the calf to its feet. He says at dusk he returned, the baby had died. Its tiny body was barely visible as the other elephants had covered him with dirt and grass and leaves. The mother positioned herself over her child and began to rock. Occasionally other elephants would stroke her back affectionately

2:22 or intertwine trunks. She continued to rock as darkness fell. Like elephants we grieve, it's normal and it's very common and it's something that we're all going to experience in life. Even though you have to go on without this person in your life, you can live through the memories that you've had over the years. Elephants touch each other with their trunks, and this physical contact seems to provide comfort. So an elephant that has appeared distressed, when another elephant comes over to it and seems to be comforting it using its trunk, and touching it, the other elephant seems to then relax, and seems to show less distress. So, similar to hugging. Comfort affection touching, hugging kissing

3:08 is quite a reassurance that, OK, there's some support there. You want people to feel supported, you want them feel like they are part of this society, they are part of this world, and they have got a purpose here.