Here’s what ‘Wild Rituals’ author Caitlin O’Connell learned from the elephants

The amazing sights of the vast African savannas are familiar to many of us through the lens of superb documentary films and videos. Though there are many animals we watch with awe, there’s one rather peculiar looking animal that captivates the heart — the elephant.   

So much about elephants make them intriguing creatures: The oversized ears, the unique nature of their trunks (which, by the way, have more muscles than an entire human body), and perhaps most of all the fact that they’re a lot like us. Elephants are loving, loyal, intelligent, family oriented, and great at teamwork. 

Elephant scientist and author Caitlin O’Connell has spent the last 30 years in Namibia’s Etosha National Park studying elephants. Amongst the many things O’Connell’s observed is the value and effort elephants place on greeting, playing, and communicating with each other. These are behaviors which O’Connell has observed could help us understand ourselves better. 

“The most powerful thing that struck me in the beginning,” O’Connell says, “is the importance of greeting. They may have only been separated for a few minutes, because the matriarch is older and slower, and she took a little longer to get to the waterhole than the rest of the group. All of a sudden [once she arrives] they have a huge greeting ceremony for her. Each one will place their trunk in her mouth and they get all excited and flap their ears. Also, for elephants, part of the greeting is urinating and defecating because they get so excited … But just seeing all of these rituals that we can see in our own lives and the importance of them, it's always a reminder to me that, ‘wow, we take some of these things for granted, that they don't.’”

O’Connell, a conservation biologist at Harvard Medical School and award-winning author of Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us About Connection, Community, and Ourselves, has specifically focused on researching the ways elephants communicate with each other — including the intriguing ground-based vibrations of an elephant’s “rumble.” 

“For a long time we knew that elephants emit these low frequency rumbles in the range of 20 hertz for a female, 10 hertz for a male,” O’Connell tells us. “They communicate in this way so that [their sounds] travel long distances … Those signals are something that they use to coordinate.”

Perhaps the most touching and moving ritual O’Connell describes, is how one elephant will grieve the loss of a family member: “They would touch the bones in a way that it wasn't like a salt lick — like [the way that] you see some animals sucking on bones of other species — [theirs] was more a tactile exploration. They would take the end of their trunk and press it down [for example] on the hip of this individual [elephant].” 

“He [the elephant] would take the sand, a little bit moist as it hasn't been that long since this [other] elephant passed away, and he would take the sand and press it against his chest and press it behind his ears in such a delicate way that it was almost as if he was trying to carry him. It was really compelling. I just have never seen that before.”

KCRW's Life Examined is a one-hour weekly show exploring science, philosophy, faith — and finding meaning in the modern world. The show is hosted by Jonathan Bastian. Please tune in Sundays at 9 a.m., or find it as a podcast.