CHAPTER 1
Hitting Reset
“Look how fat that baby is,” I say. The fifteen-month-old looks like a ball of butter. Four adults and three little babies are playing in a muddy pool, spraying water over their backs with their trunks, then sprawling on the squishy bank. It’s soothing just to watch.
The elephants seem happy. But when elephants seem happy to us, do they really feel happy?
“Elephants experience joy,” Cynthia Moss tells me. Cynthia is a scientist who has studied them for forty years. “It may not be human joy,” she says. “But it is joy.”
Elephants act joyful in the same situations that make us joyful: familiar friends and family, lush food and drink. So we easily assume they feel the way we feel. But beware of assumptions!
Understanding animals’ thoughts and feelings happens to be the main quest of this book. The tricky task ahead: to go only where evidence and logic lead. And—to get it right. I am here at Amboseli National Park in Kenya, Africa, because I am ready to learn, ready to ask. How are they like us? What do they teach us about ourselves?
“What has a lifetime of watching elephants,” I ask Cynthia, “taught you about humanity?” I glance to make sure my recorder’s light is on, then settle back a bit. Forty years of insight; this will be good.
What I don’t see coming is: I have the question almost exactly backward.
Cynthia gently deflects my question. “I think of them as elephants,” she says. “I’m interested in them as elephants. Comparing elephants to people—I don’t find it helpful. I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself.”
It takes me a moment to “get” her comment. Then—I am stunned.
As a lifelong student of animal behavior, I’d long ago concluded that many social animals—certainly birds and mammals—are, in many ways, like us. I’ve come here to see how elephants are “like us.” I am writing this book about how other animals are “like us.” But I’d just gotten a major course correction.
Cynthia’s comment hit Reset, not just on my question, but on my thinking. I’d somehow assumed that my quest was to let the animals show how much they are like us.
My task now—a much harder task—is to see who animals are—like us or not.
CHAPTER 2
Seeing Elephants
“It was the worst year of my life,” Cynthia Moss is saying over breakfast. “All the elephants over fifty years old, except Barbara and Deborah, died. Most over forty died. So it’s particularly amazing that Alison, Agatha, and Amelia have survived.”
Alison, now fifty-one years old, is right there, in that clump of palms. When Cynthia—who still has bright blue eyes and a bubbly personality—arrived in Kenya forty years ago to study the lives of elephants, she came here. The first elephant family she saw she designated the “AA” family, and she named one of those elephants Alison. And there Alison is. Right there, vacuuming up fallen palm fruits. Astonishing.
With luck and decent rainfall, Alison might survive ten more years. And there is Agatha, forty-four years old. And this one coming closer now is Amelia, also forty-four.
Amelia continues approaching, until—rather alarmingly—she is looming so hugely in front of our vehicle that I reflexively lean farther into the vehicle. Cynthia leans out and talks to her in soothing tones. Amelia, practically alongside us now, simply towers as she grinds palm fronds, rumbles softly, and blinks.
* * *
Cynthia helped pioneer the surprisingly difficult task of simply seeing elephants doing elephant things. Longer than any other human being ever has, Cynthia has watched some of the same individual elephants living their lives.
This national park—Amboseli—is actually too small for the hundreds of elephants who use it. Amboseli elephants use an area roughly twenty times larger than the park itself. The elephants come here for water. As do cattle- and goat-grazing Maasai people. The only year-round water is here. The 150-square-mile park serves as a central watering hole for the surrounding 3,000 square miles. The park is too small to feed them all. The outer lands are too dry to water them. The food is out there; the water is in here.
Just four years ago, extreme lack of rain—a drought—shook this place to its core. “To survive the drought,” Cynthia is explaining, “different elephant families tried different strategies. Some tried to stay close to the marsh. But they did very badly as it dried. Some went far north, many for the first time in their lives. They did better. Out of fifty-eight families, only one family did not lose anybody.” One family of elephants lost seven adult females and thirteen youngsters. “Usually if an elephant goes down, the family gathers around and tries to lift it. In the drought, they had no energy. Watching them dying, seeing them on the ground in agony…” Cynthia closes her eyes and shakes her head.
One in four of Amboseli’s elephants—four hundred, out of a population of sixteen hundred—perished. Nearly every nursing baby died. About 80 percent of the zebras and wildebeests died, and nearly all of the Maasai people’s cattle. Even humans died.
But when the rain returned, it triggered the biggest baby boom in Cynthia’s history here. About 250 little elephants were born in the last two years. This is a sweet spot in time to be born an elephant in Amboseli. Lush vegetation, plenty of grass—and little competition. And water. Water makes elephants happy.
Several happy elephants are sloshing through an emerald spring under the shade of palm trees. They seem to have found a little patch of elephant paradise.
* * *
The elephants we’re watching are skillfully pulling up grass and brush with their trunks and stuffing their cheeks, their massive molars mightily mashing away. Thorns that can puncture a tire, palm fruits, bundles of grass—it all goes in. I once stroked a captive elephant’s tongue. So soft. I don’t understand how their tongues and stomachs can handle those thorns. I realize I don’t know much about them.
But Cynthia does. “When you look at a group of anything—lions, zebras, elephants,” Cynthia explains, “you’re seeing just two flat dimensions. But once you know them individually, who their mother was, who their kids are, their personalities…” One elephant in a family might seem regal, dignified, gentle. Another will strike you as shy. Another as a bully who will be pushy to get food in sparse times, another as reserved, another as exceptionally playful.
Copyright © 2019 by Carl Safina
