Exceptional Behavior African Elephants Show

The study conducted by Karen McComb, Lucy Baker and Cynthia Moss attempts to demonstrate the exceptional behavior African Elephants show, which suggest their similarities to human animals in their tendencies to attach great importance to the remains of the bodies of their deceased relatives. They propose the experimental representation of object arrays to test a hypothesis that supports the elephant’s preference for skulls and ivory over other objects, as well as the elephant’s tendency to prefer the skulls of their matriarchs over the skulls of other elephants that were not part of their kin.

The experiment consisted of the exposure of different families of elephants to animal skulls, ivory and natural objects in order to investigate first, weather the elephants were attracted to elephant skulls, ivory or a natural object; second, weather the elephants would be more attracted to an elephant skull over the skulls of other large mammals; and third to examine whether they select specifically their matriarch’s skull for investigation. The results for the first experiment showed that elephants preferred ivory over both the elephant skull and the natural object. The second experiment showed that they seem more interested in the elephant skull over the skull of a buffalo and a rhino. The third experiment showed no significant difference in the individuals’ interest between the skull of their matriarch and the skull of other matriarchs.

The way in which these experiments were constructed, seemed to give a great emphasis to the fact that elephants may actually possess the human-like capacity of “grieving” their relatives and their “exceptional” capabilities of ritualizing death. This is considered to be a very complex behavior, which is mostly thought of as exclusive to human animals. The approach that the authors have inclined for in order to interpret this behavior could be considered anthropomorphism by omission, which shows the failure to contemplate that other animals have a very different world to ours, and the continuous contribution of human traits to any of their behavior that might resemble human traits in some way. For example in this case, the experimenters associate the elephants’ interest in coming into contact with skulls and ivory as a signal of the “ritual” behavior for grieving; when in fact, this behavior could be elicited by a number of other different circumstances that until now have not been confirmed.

This experiment was conducted in a way that allowed different hypotheses to be tested in an attempt to rule out other explanations for the findings. There was also a great understanding of the possibility that the elephants could have been attracted to these objects because of a strong response towards novel objects, or simply because of fidelity to certain routes