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Thick-skinned, but sensitive communicators

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Two news stories drove home to me this week the vital importance of social communication. In one, from a German animal park, a young mother elephant both horrified and mystified TV viewers by appearing to crush her new-born calf – who was fortunately rescued from death by park staff.

In the other story, from southern Sudan, hundreds of elephants were astonishingly discovered to have created for themselves a safe refuge from hunters on a remote island, remaining hidden from human view throughout the chaos of the country’s civil war and the unrestricted hunting that has continued since then.

  

What’s the explanation common to these two striking reports on animal behavior? A frequent media commentator on elephants, Ian Redmond of the Born Free Foundation pointed out that elephants don’t merely have instincts. “They are cultural animals,” he told BBC World News. In other words, elephants learn how handle situations by being “told”, and shown, how to behave by their elders.

  

Pori, the evidently abusive mother, grew up in captivity, without benefit of the elephant tradition in the wild of “allomothering” – which is simply described by Stanford University research associate Caitlin O’Connell (pictured above left) as a practice “where a sister or aunt would watch over a baby” whenever a mother might be busy. (The term, or at least its prefix, derives from the Greek allo - “by another”).

 

Such babysitting experience begins at a young age, and when eventually a female’s own turn to give birth arrives, she is often aided by an even more experienced “midwife”.  We know all too well about child-abuse, and even infanticide, among human mothers who have been poorly prepared for motherhood. It need come as no surprise that it can happen among elephants too.

 

Happily, after a period of calm (and drugged sedation) Pori is now reunited with her calf and the two are reported to be doing well together.

 

The other, perhaps more remarkable development reported by Reuters agency – of elephants managing to congregate from across large distances in the Horn of Africa to avoid harm from humans - is well explained, I believe, by a discovery that Caitlin O’Connell can justly claim as her own.

 

O’Connell stands in a noble line of female American elephant observers, like Cynthia Moss, Joyce Poole and Katy Payne, and has gone a dramatic step further than Payne’s findings on how elephants communicate with each other through infrasound - vocal rumblings below the range of human hearing. O’Connell has demonstrated that elephants have also learned to use seismic vibrations – yes, through the ground – to send messages extending over many miles. They send the messages, and “hear” them too, through those extraordinary huge but sensitive feet (above right ... maybe, fancifully, a message is about to be pounded out and/or received?)

 

The Free Press division of Simon and Schuster has published O’Connell’s memoir-style account of how she made her incisive determination, and established experimental proof of it in laboratory-style test-conditions at Oakland Zoo, an open testing ground in a Texas game reserve,  and in the wild across Etosha National Park in Namibia. The book is called aptly enough “The Elephant’s Secret Sense”, and it evocatively captures a world of previously unimagined “conversations” between these majestic creatures.

 

It’s a thrilling read – and for more than elephant-obsessives like myself. Besides revealing how elephants tell each other about impending danger and other essential information, O’Connell also ranges more broadly and explores with poignancy and compassion the saddening conflicts, usually over dwindling resources, that multiply daily between humans and animals in Africa.

 

 

AS I REFLECT ON PACHYDERMS COMMUNICATING SO WELL in order to escape southern Sudan’s men with guns, I have to consider the sickening irony about humanity that lurks alongside this story. Further north and west, in Darfur, the Sudanese government presides over human genocide – more than 200,000 lives destroyed so far. This at a time when human communications systems are technically the most advanced and sophisticated we have ever known, and compelling news about the mass killings has resounded for years around the world.

 

Yet it seems the best that can be done in reaction is for the George W Bush Administration to impose new sanctions this week (“too little too late” according to the Save Darfur campaign) against 31 Sudanese companies and three prominent Sudanese individuals.

 

And Sudan’s powerful business partner and paymaster, China, has already peremptorily dismissed these sanctions, with Beijing's envoy Liu Giujin saying: “they can only make the problems more complicated”.

 

It amounts to a call-and-response in world affairs that crudely mocks our supposed role as the most evolved of the animals.