Elephant Herds Mourn, Bury Their Dead Calves, Finds Study By IFS Officer

Elephants are one of the most intelligent and social animals on the planet. There have been many documented cases of their remarkable memory power, intelligence, and compassion.?

Mother elephants have also been seen carrying the body of their dead calves, sometimes for days.

istock/ Representational Image

Elephants bury dead calves

Now a new study has said that Asian elephants loudly mourn and bury their dead calves.

The study, published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa documented five cases of calf burials in Bengal in 2022 and 2023.

According to the study co-authored by IFS officer Parveen Kaswan and Akashdeep Roy, a Doctoral Researcher at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, in each of the five cases the herd carried the deceased calf by the trunk and legs before burying it in the earth with its legs facing upward.

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Similar pattern in all burials?

"Through opportunistic observation, digital photography, field notes, and postmortem examination reports, we suggest that the carcasses were buried in an abnormal recumbent style irrespective of the reasons for the calf's death," the study said.

In one instance the herd loudly roared and trumpeted around the buried calf, the authors wrote.

Only calves are buried

The study found that only calves are carried away for burial, owing to the "non-feasibility" of transporting heavier adult elephants by the rest of their herds.

Clear footprints of between 15 and 20 elephants were observed around the burial sites and over the soil covering the bodies of the calves, all of which had died of multiple organ failure aged between three months and a year.

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The elephants buried the calves in irrigation canals on tea estates, hundreds of meters away from the nearest human settlements.

In all five cases the herd "fled the site within 40 minutes of burial" and later avoided returning to the area, instead taking different parallel routes for migration.

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