While grief is common to many animals, funeral rituals are not. However, they are well documented in African elephants.[7]
Ronald K. Siegel writes that: "...one cannot ignore the elaborate burying behaviour of elephants as a similar sign of ritualistic or even religious behaviour in that species. When encountering dead animals, elephants will often bury them with mud, earth and leaves. Animals known to have been buried by elephants include rhinos, buffalos, cows, calves, and even humans, in addition to elephants themselves. Elephants have [been] observed burying their dead with large quantities of food fruit, flowers and colourful foliage."
They do a lot of interesting things, like snap branches seemingly at random as they walk
They also break the earth up, scoop it and toss it over their genitals post birth to clean
Remarkable creatures, they seem to have a very deep intelligence related to their natural environment
They do a lot of interesting things, like snap branches seemingly at random as they walk
oh god oh fuck they've invented ADHD and fidgeting
"The elephant is the largest of them all, and in intelligence approaches the nearest to man. It understands the language of its country, it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon."
-Pliny, Natural History
😭
in intelligence approaches the nearest to man
it obeys commands
D O M E S T I C A T I O N
Elephants are the dopest fucking animals dude I love them they have incredibly advanced social structures and even ritual, they are also nice af.
Elephants are thought to be highly altruistic animals that even aid other species, including humans, in distress. In India, an elephant was helping locals lift logs by following a truck and placing the logs in pre-dug holes upon instruction from the mahout (elephant trainer). At a certain hole, the elephant refused to lower the log. The mahout came to investigate the hold-up and noticed a dog sleeping in the hole. The elephant only lowered the log when the dog was gone. When an elephant is hurt, other elephants (even if they are unrelated) aid them.
Death ritual
Elephant researcher Martin Meredith recalls in his book an occurrence of a typical elephant death ritual as witnessed by Anthony Hall-Martin, a South African biologist who had studied elephants in Addo, South Africa, for over eight years. The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks, trying to lift her. The elephant herd were all rumbling loudly. The calf was observed to be weeping and made sounds that sounded like a scream, but then the entire herd fell silent. They then began to throw leaves and dirt over the body and broke off tree branches to cover her. They spent the next two days quietly standing over her body. They sometimes left to get water or food, but they would always return.
Once communism is established I'm going to form the elephant moon commune and summarily execute anyone who fucks with the big beautiful beasts.
Trophy hunters get the wall.
Poachers are impoverished people scraping for any opportunity to make the money to feed themselves and their families, likely because of something a colonialist empire did in ravaging their nation.
Calling to kill poor people who struggle to meet the demand of rich foreigners is ecofascism.
Agreed. I can completely understand the immediate instinct to want to harm poachers, but you really gotta think about why they're poachers. They don't do it because it's fun and enjoyable.
Really one of the best features on this site, and I don't think any other site can really compete on that either.
My problem is their names are not always obvious so I don't know how to find them
The discussions of intelligent life in the cosmos always depresses me because it is already here and our heads are too far up are asses to realize it. These things animals do that resemble what we do are genuinely the same process of evolution as what humans once went and continue to go through. This sort of ritual or any other ritual elephants practice is a community building ritual, not out of some intent to build a community, but because a community knit together by spiritual practice is stronger and more resistant to extinction. The same goes for any phenomena that appears independently in humans and animals. They are evolutionary phenomenons, not some development of the human mind, but of sheer accident that gave the species an evolutionary edge. Farming, tools, symbiotic relationships, social organization, religions, etc. All are just accidents that could emerge or are emerging in other species than humans
In the same way, our conceptions of invading alien species and the stories we tell of them are entirely a projection of our relationship to animals (and oftentimes other humans). The saddest thing is that if we did discover intelligent life on another planet, our first instinct would be to hunt and eat them.
On the other hand, the Dark Forest theory the Three Body Problem... https://blog.usejournal.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-universe-a52012529e0f
It hinges on the premise that superluminal travel is a limited resource sentient races are all trying to control and that alien races need to commit Ecocide in order to prevent competitive consumption. It also posits an eternal state of civil war between races, as communities diverge from one another geographically only to come back into conflict out of the same resource conflict. I don't think this pans out, even on Earth. Humans seem to have grown more passive over time, and more social. Our Dunbar Number is expanding to fit the needs of our increasingly interconnected world. Those bigger networks are rewarding their members with longer lifespans, healthier offspring, and an infectious ideology.
I'm more prone to adopt the theory that humans simply wouldn't recognize an alien if we saw one. We're peering out into the infinite abyss of space, looking for flying saucers and asteroid robots and big blinking Dyson Spheres. Has anyone bothered to check under the clouds of Jupiter? Or the oceans of Europa, even? If a spatial body was transmitting a superluminal radio signal, would we even know how to listen to it? We're like ants searching for other ants by waving our antenna at the moon.
Maybe Dark Forest Theory is correct and extraterrestrial life really is an All-Against-All war of attrition. Or maybe we're just a bunch of primitive assholes hanging out on the rural end of a galactic empire and we just can't see it for the glare of ten thousand suns.
Certain possible. And it's just incredibly expensive and difficult for us to check.
Stories about invading aliens just rip off the european conquest and genocide of the americas
Your comment resonates with me a lot because I've thought about the same thing. As a communist when you think about the existence of actual alien intelligent life tomorrow the prospects are really bad. Humans aren't capable of accepting another species that may be intellectually/morally/economically superior. As humans most people can't even accept other humans in those situations.
And then when you think about the evolution of the next intelligent life form on earth, even disregarding the destruction of the environment, it is also pretty clear we are the dominant species in such a way that no intelligent life form could exist that resembles anything more than a human child level of intelligence because again we are simply not capable of understanding or handling the responsibility of co-existence.
People always wonder why we feel empathy for some animal suffering but allow other humans to suffer. I wont go into all the other reasons(and there are plenty) but one of them is undoubtedly that we know these animals are less intelligent, therefore "innocent".
This is because we rely on agency to determine morality. Animals are perceived to not have agency because they are dumb. As soon as they are understood to be intelligent, some people will start to attribute agency to their actions and then you'll see the shift in morality, now our actions will be(more) "justifiable".
Animal intelligence is a fascinating field of study. Of course, a lot of it is speculation. We'll never know exactly what they think, just as we can dissect a brain and see that it had the capability of complex thought, we'll never be able to see those thoughts, at least not without some Star trek level of technology. Either way, speculating about what they're thinking is pretty cool and I like to pretend that maybe they have some dope elephant pagan beliefs like the moon is the original elephant and they wave sticks in reverence. Maybe all animals worship the moon. Maybe that's why wolves howl at it. Idk, thinking about shit like this is way more fun than existing in this hellworld.
We don't dissect Catholics to understand why they think the trinity is true. We watch them go to mass and unite Ireland, that is what we do.
Refusing to learn the accent and sticking electrodes into Dubliners’ heads to try and decipher what they mean in RP.
Fellas, does your girl
- have a wrinkly ass
- "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual"
- big ears and nose
- bury her dead
- communicate with you
Then that's not your girl, that's an African elephant.
I'm glad, communication is the key to a strong relationship
🐘Coolest 🐘 Mammal🐘 By🐘Far🐘
Fascinating, thanks for the cool elephant facts.
Truly gentle giants, got to love them.
Really biased and shitty way of stating the fact that elephants are responsible for making the moon wax but okay 🙄
Makes that picture of Don JR having murdered an elephant even more horrific.
With poachers and shit that live in those areas and do it out of desperation for food and money from* the ivory trade, I can sympathize even though it still upsets me. But, any first world fuck who does that shit should put before a firing squad. That elephant was worth more than that fucking puke's entire vermin-shit family ever was or will be.
In my ideal alternate universe, it's Hunter Biden and he's posing with a murdered Don Jr.
Elephants: waving sticks around
British electronic musicians: falling off roofs trying to get a closer look
Folks, the moon, it's real
He dragged an actual 700 pound piano out there? Haha, I don't think it could---
*ears flap for the first time*
Totally worth it. That's so cute--oh shit I'm bawling :ohnoes: what's happening? I'm going to have to reapply my sunscreen after this video.
That's beautiful. What a cool guy too, bringing his piano to the jungle to play for elephants.
