Elephants Reassure Each Other in Times of Distress

We’ve observed various characteristics in elephants that make them seem quite, well, human in their interactions—they recognise themselves in mirrors, experience grief, and get PTSD—and a paper published today adds another to the list: they reassure each other when one of them gets scared.

The study, authored by Joshua Plotnik from Mahidol University in Thailand and Frans de Waal from Emory University in Atanta, and published in the journal PeerJ, found that elephants interacted with each other in certain ways after one of them had reacted to something in distress, than during in control periods.

This is a rare trait among animals and the first time it’s been observed in elephants; as the researchers explained, “Contact directed by uninvolved bystanders toward others in distress, often termed consolation, is uncommon in the animal kingdom, thus far only demonstrated in the great apes, canines, and corvids.” Corvids are types of birds including crows. They suggest the reason it’s so rare could be because it takes certain cognitive abilities—like being able to take an empathetic perspective—to act in a reassuring manner.

They shy away from the term “consolation,” because while they observed elephants interacting after one of them had exhibited signs of distress, they couldn’t tell for sure if the second elephant was responding specifically to the first elephant, or making a delayed reaction to the initial cause of distress. “We recognize that our inability to identify a clear stimulus for each distress event makes it difficult to differentiate between cases where individuals are reacting directly to the stimulus or to another elephant’s distress,” they wrote, and added that they therefore opted for the term “reassurance” instead.

In their study, they looked at 26 Asian elephants in a park in Thailand. They watched for moments where one elephant expressed distress—usually by putting their ears forward, tail up, and making noises like trumpets or roars—and then observed other elephants’ responses. They found that elephants often mimicked the “victim’s” actions. They usually went over to the distressed elephant, rather than the distressed elephant coming to them, and if there were more than one bystander, they’d sometimes bunch up in a group around the spooked animal.

In a video on the Emory University website you can see an elephant Science identifies as Jokla making distressed sounds and movements, and then a second, named Mae Perm, doing the same before chirping—apparently a reassuring sound—and caressing Jokla with her trunk. The researchers characterised the act of one elephant putting their trunk in another's mouth as an elephant “hug.”

The researchers concluded that the behaviour they observed suggested an emotional contagion among elephants that could imply empathy. Plotnik now wants to look at elephants in the wild instead of just those captive in a park, but suggests that this type of consolatory behaviour shows elephants are perhaps even closer to us than we previously imagined: “Humans are unique in many ways, but not in as many ways as we once thought.”