Bone collectors

It is a common belief to think that elephants participate in pilgrimages in what is now referred to as an Elephant Cemetery. Time to ruin every one’s wild imagination: there are no such things.

The explanation is quite simple, it lies in the very being of elephants. They are born with four sets of six molar teeth, lodged at the back of each half-jaw. Growing up, they chew on these molars and they grind out, leaving a smooth surface that falls out and is then replaced by a new teeth. When they get to seventy (for the lucky ones not butchered), they run out of working teeth and wander around, looking for spots with tender grasses and weeds. Eventually, they end up in marshes or swamps or riverbeds to die there of hunger when their rotten teeth cannot chew anything, even the most tender of aquatic plants. After decades, all the elders have ended up in those kind of places. Their bodies get scavenged by wultures, lions, jackals and hyaenas and such opportunists. Their bones licked dry, their tusks taken away by park rangers to be stored somewhere in case the ivory market reopens.

Those huge white skeletons attract inevitably elephants passing nearby while looking for food. They, in hierarchical order, approach and touch the ancestors, remembering a friend, a passing stranger, a relative. Their smell is nothing compared to their memory (thsi part is no myth), and they can tell the difference between a total stranger’s carcass and some elephants they knew. Scientists have even watched  elephants covering dead relatives with branches, pulling out whole bushes from the damp ground. Some kind of early belief in an after life or just a sign of respect towards death. Who knows.

The strongest moment I ever witnessed related with elephants when we spotted a young female who had given birth the a couple of days before was staggering to stay with the group. At the back of the march, she was waiting for her almost newborn calf to catch up. The matriarch, knowing food was near and hearing us from far, had kept walking. We thought the mother and her baby would get lost (she was quite young and probably didn’t know her way to that particular waterhole yet). But then three young females from the group emerged from the nearing treeline: sisters, cousins… who cares. They helped the young elephant to walk straight, one one each side, holding him with their bellies. The last one stepped behind him and pushed him/her gently with her trunk. It helped, the five of them got back to the rest of the family and arrived together at the waterhole. Elephants. Emotion, family, solidarity. An example some could follow.