and smell and to extremely subtle body language of both their own and other
species (including humans). They are aware of sounds and smells from both
their biotic and abiotic environment.
Morality Chapter | 6 39
These multiple means of communication operate over a prolonged period
of time in which behavioral patterns are transferred from adults to juveniles.
Behavioral patterns that promote survival of the herd are embedded within
the females and passed to successive generations. Vested in the emotions that
promote this survival a positive feedback loop is created where survival of the
individual is promoted by this social system with the success of the system am-
plified through survival. Moral behavior through social norms contributes to the
survival where sympathy, empathy, mutual aid, fairness, and conflict resolution
work to promote survival becoming established as the moral underpinnings of
the society.
Morality begins with the mother and her young. Rules governing what may
or may not be done are first imposed by the mother and ultimately adopted by
the community as a whole. The rules governing status or positions in the group
establish rank and influence reciprocity, intentionality, and expectation. The
dominance structure within an elephant herd provides guidance to resources
and limits confrontation. To understand morality in elephants we need to exam-
ine the nature and occurrence of these elements of morality within an elephant
society (Figure 6.7).
If morality is traced from its very beginnings there is both evidence that
moral behavior promotes survival, especially in social animals, and that ani-
mals have moral emotions. Once the evolutionary roots of morality are granted,
there is no subsequent going back and arguing that because humans have pro-
gressively added sophistication to the definition of morality, animals by these
human designations are not moral. For example, philosophers may require that
FIGURE 6.7 Fights between mature males can be violent and prolonged battles, sometimes ending in serious and fatal injuries. Males in musth tend to win such fights and go on to become the consort of the female in estrous, staying with her and protecting her from the other males for 4 or 5 days.
40 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
morality develop artificial virtues such as justice and conclude that because
animals cannot develop justice they are not moral beings.
Darwin connected social bonds to morality but does not believe social senti-
ments are sufficient to produce true morality. Ultimately, Darwin thinks that
only humans are moral beings. de Waal (see Rowlands, 2012, p. 20) sees moral-
ity in evolutionary terms laying the foundations that humans ultimately built
upon. However, all three (Darwin, de Waal, and Hume) take human morality as
the benchmark and argue that animals fall short of this benchmark (Rowlands,
pp. 22–23).
Others including Bekoff and Pierce (Rowlands, p. 23) do not set a bench-
mark and argue that animals act morally even though this may not be how hu-
mans behave. Bekoff and Pierce (Rowland, p. 23) see animal moral behavior
within a social group as promoting well-being and limiting harm. They recog-
nize three behavioral clusters as paramount in determining morality: a coopera-
tion cluster including altruism, reciprocity, trust, punishment, and revenge; an
empathy cluster including empathy, compassion, caring, helping, grieving, and
consoling; and a justice cluster including a sense of fair play, sharing, desire for equity, expectations concerning descent and entitlement, indignation, retribution, and spite (Bekoff and Pierce, 2009, Wild Justice, p. 7).
Rowlands believes that this definition of morality is too broad and deficient
in drawing clear distinctions between behavior and motivation. For example, the
cooperation cluster consists mostly of behaviors while the justice cluster consists mainly of motivational states, agreeing with de Waal that what is important
in morality is the underlying motivation rather than the actual behavior. So the
reason why food is shared is more important than the fact that animals do share.
Having said this, however, Rowlands fails to provide anywhere in his otherwise
excellent discussion Can Animals be Moral a concise and clear definition of
morality. The closest he comes (p. 8) is that only if an animal displays “ concern”
for another’s welfare can you claim that it is exhibiting a moral response. Only
later (pp. 32–36) does Rowlands provide clearer insight in discussing “morally
laden emotions,” which provide reasons for those actions such that animals can
possibly be moral subjects if they are motivated by emotions that have a moral
content. They are not, however, moral agents who are responsible for their ac-
tions. And ultimately (p. 254), “if animals can act for moral reasons then they
are worthy of moral respect.”
Chapter 7
Emotions
In our attempt to penetrate the mind of an elephant, we have examined some
aspects of the structure of the elephant’s brain focusing on those parts that
relate, in particular, to memory and olfactory and auditory functions. We have
stressed that compartmentalization of the brain must be considered in con-
junction with the integrated functioning of the brain. More realistically, the
brain operates as a highly interactive system with rapid and complex feedback
between different parts of the brain that occur without conscious intervention.
We have made frequent comparisons to human brains and human behavior and
must conclude at this point that there are more similarities between cognitive
functions of humans and elephants (and other animals, especially the primates)
than there are differences.
The composition and content of the elephant’s brain is to a large degree a
consequence of evolution, so that what is referred to as nature goes a long way
in determining who an elephant is. Nurture, on the other hand, composed of the
environment in which the elephant lives, including how and by whom the elephant
is raised, shapes what has been determined by nature. The powerful social sys-
tems with strong bonds and attachments link the social and emotional centers
of the elephant’s brain and there is a neural substrate to emotions and feelings.
Elephants are who they are not just because they are born elephants but because
they are nurtured in a given social system.
In this chapter emotions are described as the platform upon which
morality is constructed. We are left with at least two difficult questions: Are
animals motivated by emotion and, if so, do these emotions have moral con-
text? Emotions that we as humans readily recognize such as compassion,
sympathy, grief, and courage are all expressions of concern. Such concern
can be both positive and negative. One can rejoice in the happiness of others
or one could resent the fact that others are happy. The important point, how-
ever, is whether the emotion felt is focused on the welfare of others. If it is,
this emotion reflects a moral response. So as Rowlands (2012, p. 8) points
out, if animals display “concern” for another’s welfare, that response can
be seen as a moral response. Ot
her difficulties are seen such as how does
one recognize the existence of concern, where concern is a conceptual issue
rather than an empirical issue, adding more evidence won’t help. The issue,
Elephant Sense and Sensibility. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-802217-7.00007-7
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
41
42 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
according to Rowlands, is “whether animals can act on the basis of moral
emotions or for moral reasons or even whether animals can be moral.” These
questions and others are pursued here:
Can emotions with moral content be attributed to animals?
How do you identify emotions with moral content?
Are animals motivated by emotion?
Does emotion cause behavior?
Can animals be motivated by moral considerations?
We also proceed in concert with major moral theory, as expressed by Rowlands
(2012, pp. 72–75), that animals possess a broad array of moral rights and as
such must be treated as “moral patients” where a moral patient is a “legitimate
object of moral concern, i.e., it has interests that should be taken into consider-
ation when decisions are made which concern or impact it” (Rowlands, 2012,
p. 72). Furthermore, an animal is a “moral subject” when it acts for “moral
reasons” but not a “moral agent” since it cannot be responsible for its actions
(Rowlands, 2012, p. 82).
In The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin (1897) grap-
pled with the question of whether emotions could be recognized in nonhuman
animals. Confining himself mainly to humans, Darwin was at pains to show
that common ancestors had common habits, resulting in a connection across
the animal kingdom. He thus believed emotions to be innate and inherited with
recognizable body language nearly universal across species (Figure 7.1). In
contrast to current thinking (Seyfarth and Cheney, 2003a; Soltis, 2010, 2013),
FIGURE 7.1 The gestural repertoire of an elephant is large, expressed in terms of body language, chemical signals including glandular secretions, sound, and other subtleties that are not detected by humans. (Pen and ink drawing by author.)
Emotions Chapter | 7 43
Darwin made little or no connection between emotion and language or lan-
guage and body language.
By examining the possible emotional content of elephants’ vocalizations,
Soltis (2013) has been able to assess a number of the above questions. Soltis
bases his recognition of emotion in the vocal expression of elephants on two
elements. The first is that physiological activity associated with emotional states
(Levenson, 2003) can influence voice characteristics by neural intervention.
Such intervention, for example, increases the tension of the vocal cords which
in turn increases the frequency of the emitted sounds. The second is to view
emotional intensity (high or low) and emotional quality (negative or positive) as
each having one of these two characteristics (Mendoza and Ruys, 2001).
As described elsewhere, elephants produce strong behavioral and vocal re-
actions to both birth and death. Behavioral signs of emotion such as increased
secretion of the temporal glands, urination, and motions of their trunks are ac-
companied by loud rumbles, trumpets, and screams. In the case of death or
when inspecting the remains of a calf (skull, bones), low-frequency sounds, in-
audible to humans, have been recorded and described as “low moaning sounds”
when speeded up to levels that can be heard by humans. The emotional content
of these sounds is extremely intense and few human listeners do not suffer a
strong sympathetic emotional reaction to these sounds.
Elephants in a herd will emit loud calling following the mating of one of
their group, called mating-pandemonium. The mated female will also emit ex-
tremely powerful and characteristic calls distinct from the pandemonium pro-
duced by her family. Collectively, these loud calls may attract the attention of
other distant males (Moss and Lee, 2011, p. 120).
Elephants have been exposed to audio playback of disturbed bees in loca-
tions where beehives have been used to protect crops. The audio responses of
elephants function as an alarm call. When these sounds made by elephants are
played back to families, they elicit fear and flight even though no bees or sounds
of bees are present. Soltis (2013) speculates that such simple emotional vo-
cal output could have been the beginning of elephant communication systems.
Alarm calls for different threats, requiring different behavioral responses such
as alerting the herd to danger or the actual confronting of a threat, are all pos-
sible within the vocal repertoire of an elephant.
The emotional state of the elephant is reflected in a wide range of vocal-
izations that do not include alarm calls. As emphasized throughout the text,
essentially no attempts have been made to record elephant vocalization on a
continuous basis with the ability to detect both calls made and calls received.
The conclusion drawn from recordings made from fixed microphones (the
Mushara experiment; see Chapter 9) is that elephants carry on a low level of
infrasonic calling, which is amplified by the detection of other calls. As technol-
ogy improves it will be possible to record multiple exchanges between members
of a herd on a continuous basis. Such records, together with other observations,
will allow descriptions of how elephants express their emotions in their voices.
44 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
Emotions expressed in human terms and recognizable by humans are seen in
orphan elephants raised at David Sheldrick’s Wildlife Trust in Kenya (Sheldrick,
2012). These often very young elephants are brought to the shelter after varying
degrees of traumatic experience. Vital to the success of the orphanage has been
Dame Sheldrick’s attempt to raise these elephants as much like elephants as
she can. In the process, this has revealed through continual close contact most
of the emotions we recognize in humans. These young elephants exhibit feel-
ings that can be described as happy to the extent that handlers believe they can
detect smiles. The calves certainly can have fun and indulge in play, help each
other, and show compassion. Conversely, they can display envy and jealousy,
be fiercely competitive, throw tantrums when they don’t get their way, develop
hang-ups, suffer from depression, miss one another, grieve deeply, and come
close to what handlers describe as shedding tears. Most recently a newborn calf,
rejected by its mother, was reported to cry, shedding tears for 5 h (http://metro.
co.uk/2013/09/11).
Interpreting signs of depression, including sadness, is difficult in humans.
While the similarity between the emotions of humans and those of elephants is
pervasive, whether elephants actually shed tears and whether this is a sign of in-
ternal stress and depression remains unknown. That elephants can feel sad or de-
pressed is widely accepted among those who have had close contact with them.
All animals detect and interpret signals transmitted consciously or uncon-
sciously by others. This body language may be u
nmistakably obvious or it may
be extremely subtle, involving more than one of the senses. The social struc-
ture of elephants, combined with their capacity to interpret multiple signals,
would suggest that they are both highly sensitive to emotional signals from
other elephants and to signals from other species, including humans. This ca-
pacity may have played a role in explaining the behavior of two herds of el-
ephants on Thula Thula, the game reserve in KwaZulu Natal established by
Lawrence Anthony. Anthony died unexpectedly on Friday, 7 March 2012, on
a visit to Johannesburg some 640 km (400 mile) from Thula Thula. Two days
later, on Sunday, 9 March, the first of the two herds of elephants in the reserve
arrived at the main farmhouse. A day later the second herd arrived. Both herds
remained in the vicinity of the farmhouse for about 2 days before disappearing
back into the bush. A memorial service was held for Anthony on the next day,
Thursday, 13 March. Neither herd had been seen near the farmhouse for the past
18 months. Anthony’s son, Dylan, estimated that both herds had traveled for
about 12 h each to reach the farmhouse.
It is likely that the scientific community would dismiss this story as an iso-
lated incident inadequately documented; at best it would be considered as purely
coincidental. In doing so, observations may be lost or ignored not because they
are faulty but because no acceptable explanation is present. Explanations can be
wrong; observations are invaluable and should be preserved at all costs.
Body language and the multiple ways in which emotions can be expressed
and transmitted may offer a plausible explanation to the response of the two
Emotions Chapter | 7 45
elephant herds on Thula Thula to the death of Lawrence Anthony. News of
Anthony's death would have reached Thula Thula within minutes of the event
on Friday. Dismay, translated to grief, would have spread rapidly amongst
the people on the farm. Women would have expressed their grief by loud
ulutation. From that point onward for the next number of days, activities
of an unusual nature would have occurred among the human population in
an increasing fashion. This heightened level of activity and the change in
the level of activity from the norm would have been easily detected by both
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