by Robert Moor
Flora, for example, had almost certainly witnessed the slaughter of her parents as a young calf. (Many scientists now believe that elephants understand the concept of death; elephants have even been seen grieving over the gravesites of family members.) Flora was subsequently abducted, put in chains, sent overseas, broken by trainers, and forced to perform for the amusement of paying customers. In the circus where she had performed, she was billed as “the world’s smallest and youngest performing elephant.”
Flora bent back her trunk until it touched her forehead, forming a bubble-letter S. The inside of her mouth was shell pink. It curled softly in on itself like the bloom of a snapdragon. “She’s so pretty,” Kelly said. “Look at that mouth!”
We stood and stared until Flora lost interest in us and sauntered off across the yard and into the trees. “This whole area used to be pines when I first came here,” Kelly remarked. “The elephants just knocked them all down.”
I asked her why.
“They’re savannah makers,” she shrugged. Many experts believe elephants act as what biologists call “ecosystem engineers.” Research by zoologist Anthony Sinclair has shown that elephants take advantage of wildfires to clear patches of forest and convert it to grassland. The elephants let the fire do the hard work of burning down most of the trees, and then they pluck out the tender green shoots that spring up in the wake of the fire, to prevent the trees from growing back. Along their trails, elephants have also been known to “garden”—pulling up saplings of encroaching trees and dispersing the seeds of the fruit they eat. In dense jungles, where wind cannot disperse seeds across long distances, elephants play Johnny Appleseed; their dung spreads the pits of large fruits like mangos, durian, and (fittingly enough) so-called elephant apples. As a result, the trails of elephants are often lined, conveniently, with their favorite fruit trees.
A young caregiver named Cody shuffled over, wearing a frayed baseball cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with skulls. I asked him something I had been wondering since I arrived there: Do the sanctuary’s elephants make trails, as they would in the wild?
I half expected him to say no. It appeared to me that whatever reasons elephants might have for following trails in the wild were absent at the sanctuary: they did not need trails to help them navigate long distances; there are no swift rivers to cross, no mountains to climb. However, Cody and Kelly both nodded; the elephants seemed to love making trails, they said. Cody pointed out a faint elephant trail that ran across the yard and along the fence line. There were others; narrow two-lane tracks that crisscrossed all over the property. Neither of them knew where most of the trails came from; most had simply appeared years ago. One elephant, named Shirley, had created a trail that led to the grave of her former companion, Bunny. (Today, the caretakers call it “Bunny’s Trail.”) They said that some of the elephants would stick to certain trails even if those trails did not provide the fastest way to get from one point to another.
I asked Kelly why she thought they were so trail obsessed, even now, after a lifetime of captivity, when trails weren’t necessary for their survival.
She smiled and shook her head.
“I’m guessing it’s deep-rooted,” she said.
Later in the day I began piecing together more clues. Kelly and I were visiting the Asian barn, on the other side of the property. Outside the barn sat two dust-yellow elephants named Misty and Dulary. They were smaller and pudgier than the Africans. Misty was lying on her side on the ground, while Dulary stood guard. Spying us, Dulary walked slowly over to the edge of the fence and stared. The shape of her forehead resembled a bull’s skull: a pair of bulging orbits hourglassing into deep, hollow temples. Her trunk hung like the hose of an old gas mask. Where the whites of her eyes should have been, there was black.
Misty rolled over onto her stomach, tucked her knees underneath her, and, in a toddlerish motion, stood up, front legs first. Her face was noticeably chubbier and wrinklier than her companion’s. Kelly described it as “smushy,” like a marshmallow. Misty walked over to Dulary. The two stood side by side: the embodiment of cuteness, the visage of death. They began feeling each other with their trunks, sweetly. Then, as if on cue, they both pissed a torrent.
Cody soon stopped by on his rounds to check in on Misty, which set in motion a smoothly choreographed routine. He walked up to the edge of the fence. Misty turned around and stuck out her knobby tail. He pulled on it gently. Then she lifted her foot. He gave it a hug.
Kelly told me that the caregivers trained the elephants to lift their feet so that they could provide medical treatment. The caregivers dedicated hours each week solely to mending damaged feet—cracked toenails, abscesses, infections—which were common among elephants that, in their former life in captivity, once spent much of the day standing on hard concrete. Making matters worse, a few of the elephants, during their former lives in captivity, had developed odd tics—some rhythmically swayed their bodies from side to side; others tossed their trunks forward and back—which zoologists call “stereotypic behaviors.” Elephants are magnificent long-distance walkers; in the wild, they can travel up to fifty miles per day. So when they are confined, they will often begin fidgeting to release the excess energy. Because the movement releases endorphins, it can become ingrained as a form of self-soothing, which over time can lead to joint and foot injuries. Foot problems, Kelly pointed out, were the leading cause of death among captive elephants.
Despite its stump-like appearance, an elephant’s foot is an oddly delicate appendage. Hidden within that fatty cylinder lies a bone structure resembling a kitten-heeled shoe. This tiptoed design allows elephants to be surprisingly nimble climbers; one hunter in colonial Africa described finding elephant trails leading up the face of a cliff he considered “inaccessible to any animal but a baboon.” In the circus, elephants have even been trained to walk tightropes.
On flat ground, a disc of fat on the sole of each foot dampens much of the impact of walking—a nine-thousand-pound elephant exerts less than nine pounds per square inch of pressure underfoot—giving them a soft, quiet tread. Their tendency to clear paths further facilitates silent creeping. Dan Wylie, the author of a cultural history of the elephant, recounts the story of a group of rangers in the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe who, while camping out one night, unwittingly fell asleep in the middle of an elephant path. In the morning, they realized that an elephant had walked directly over their bodies without waking even a single one of them. Its footprint was stamped into the groundsheet between where they lay.
Yet more incredibly, it appears that elephants may also use their feet to listen for messages from distant members of their herd. An elephant researcher named Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell—who previously studied the way Hawaiian planthoppers communicate by sending vibrations through a blade of grass—found that elephants can use what she called their “giant stethoscope feet” to detect distant alarm calls transmitted through the ground. She theorized that elephants’ feet could also detect the rumble of thunder from up to a hundred miles away. If so, this would help explain their mysterious ability to travel across vast distances to the precise location of newly rain-fed land.
The feet, I realized, might provide a clue to how elephants can find the easiest route across hundreds of miles of jungle or desert. In fact, when I thought about it, the whole of an elephant’s body is perfectly engineered for creating trails. With their powerful sense of smell and hearing, elephants can detect food, water, and other elephants from many miles away. With their broad shoulders, they can bash through dense brush. Because of their immense weight—it requires twenty-five times the amount of energy for an elephant to climb one vertical meter as it does to travel the same distance on flat terrain—elephants will travel to great lengths searching for shallow inclines. (This explains why, as I had noticed in Tanzania, elephants always find the easiest place to cross a river drainage.) Elephant brains, too, are ideally tooled for
trail-making; their fabled memory is no myth, particularly in regards to spatial information. They have evolved, it seems, to learn the land.
On top of everything else, the family structure of elephants is extremely conducive to trail creation. Typically, herds of female elephants travel single file, with their matriarch in the lead. It is the role of each matriarch to memorize the location of grazing spots and watering holes; over repeated journeys, those routes are taught to the younger elephants, one of which will grow up to become the next matriarch.I This hierarchical, clan-based form of travel likely dates back to the dawn of their species. Paleontologists have discovered a six-million-year-old “Proboscidean trackway”—the fossilized footprints of thirteen female elephant-like creatures moving together along the same path. Over time, given their sheer size and social structure, elephants will—whether they want to or not—print out trails in their passing.
The unique physiology and social structure of elephants explains how they create such elegant trails. But why they follow them remained unclear to me. With all these powerful instruments of perception at their disposal, do elephants need trails, or are trails merely a by-product of walking? Do they give them any more thought than we give the footprints we leave in an inch of newly fallen snow?
I asked these questions to an ecologist named Stephen Blake, whose work focuses on how animal movement affects the land’s ecology. In the late 1990s, Blake began studying the ways that forest elephants disperse fruit seeds throughout Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. To better understand where the elephants were traveling, he started creating a rough map of their trails. Hiking through the swamps and rainforests, he systematically surveyed the trees surrounding the elephant paths, paying special attention to trail intersections. He discovered that the trails overwhelmingly found their way to clumps of fruit trees or to mineral deposits. Other studies have revealed that in desert landscapes, where elephants are forced to cover vast distances to survive, trails likewise tend to connect watering holes and grazing areas. “Lo and behold,” Blake said, “just like all the footpaths in England lead to either the pub or the church, all elephant trails tend to lead to something that elephants want to get to.”
Blake suggested that, even if these trails are not created with any conscious foresight, they quickly come to serve a number of functions. “Let’s say you’ve got naive elephants in a forest they’ve never been to, and there are various trees dotting the area,” he said. “I suspect at first elephants would go bumbling around and wait until they bumped into a fruit tree, and in doing so, they would have knocked down a load of vegetation to get there, and they would perhaps remember the geographic location of that tree. And even if they didn’t, as they kept bumbling, they’re probably going to create a path of least resistance through otherwise thick vegetation. So, just like when you go for a walk through the woods, you get to know which trails lead to a good place and which don’t, presumably elephants learn, and certain trails start being reinforced.”
In the jungle, where resources like fruit trees are plentiful but randomly distributed, or in the desert, where resources like watering holes are rare and far-flung, trails serve to reduce the amount of bumbling (a costly activity, energy-wise) and lower the chances of an elephant missing the mark. “Elephants, just like people, get disoriented,” Blake explained. Trails can reorient lost elephants and reconnect disparate populations. In doing so, trails serve as “a form of societal spatial memory”—a collective, externalized mnemonic system, not unlike that of ants or caterpillars.
And it turns out that the big brains and powerful sense organs of elephants, rather than obviating the need for trails, in fact allow them to create vaster and more complex trail networks. Instead of just signifying this way leads to something good, as a caterpillar’s trails do, memory allows for the nuance of new categories: Animals can learn that this way leads to fruit, this way leads to water, and even (in an elephant’s case) this way leads to my sister’s grave. Animals can begin to feel oriented within a network, aware of where they are in relation to the things they need. In a sense, memory can serve as a trail guide—not necessarily a full record of where things are, but an index of how to quickly access them.
Given their powerful memories and the similarity of their trail networks to our own, I wondered if elephants had grown to regard trails roughly the way we do—which is to say, symbolically. I asked Blake: Does an elephant know what a trail means? In other words, do elephants recognize a trail not just as an easy place to walk or an instinctive attraction, but as a symbolic indication that something worth reaching lies at the other end?
I had posed the same question to dozens of animal researchers—with areas of expertise ranging from caterpillars to cattle—without ever getting a satisfying answer. Blake’s response was unequivocal: “For sure.”
Creating symbolic trails may seem an onerous mental feat for a nonhuman animal, but in fact, with a vast enough plot of land to memorize, thinking symbolically becomes the path of least resistance. It collapses a complex environment down into neat, easily recognizable lines, and then individuates each of those lines according to its destination, like the color-coded lines of a subway system. Certainly, animals could navigate without them, but it would be more difficult, and natural selection, as Richard Dawkins has observed, “abhors waste.”
Relying on trail networks for survival is not without its dangers, though. In places like the Congo, the elephant trail network has recently been disrupted by logging operations, which has left the elephants dangerously disoriented. Blake described the effects of the destruction this way: “Let’s say you take a vibrant city that was bombed to buggery in World War II—you take Coventry or Dresden—that had transport networks all over the place. It was interconnected, everybody knew how to get from one side of the city to another. All of that infrastructure that people understood, it was the basis of their lives—and then it got the crap bombed out of it, and buildings fell, piles of rubble everywhere. Then, you just have chaos. Similarly, when you selectively cut a rainforest—you send in bulldozers, you chop out one or two trees per hectare, you pull them out, and in doing so you knock down a lot of other trees, you create other roadways—you just erase what was there. Even if you don’t go in and kill the elephants, you’ve done astonishing damage to that sort of beautiful latticework, that functioning system.”
Once a trail system or a learned migration route is severed—as, increasingly and alarmingly, they are, due to human habitation and industry—it rarely reestablishes itself, and the population suffers crippling losses. This is why the zebra migration route Bartlam-Brooks had uncovered in the Okavango served as such a startling, hopeful discovery. If her theory is correct, it means that, once the fence fell, a herd of elephants managed to revive one of their ancestral routes, which led to a blooming valley of fresh grass hundreds of miles away. Once the elephants’ path was reestablished, hordes of other animals could then benefit from the wisdom revealed by the passage of those broad, sensile feet.
PART II
Herding
After I left the elephant sanctuary, I kept thinking back to the image of Misty obediently raising her hind foot so that Cody could inspect it. Before I arrived there, I had expected the elephants would be distant and aloof, carefully avoiding humans, the spindly creatures who had once terrorized them so viciously. But watching Misty and Cody, what struck me about their exchange was that it seemed so calm, so natural; it had none of the air of begrudging acquiescence one often sees when elephants are forced to perform silly tricks. It was gentle, almost affectionate. What it reminded me of most, I later realized, was a handshake.
Knowing how much violence can go into training circus elephants, I was curious about how much coercion had gone into teaching Misty this gesture. According to Kelly, the process was totally pain-free. It was a textbook case of Pavlovian conditioning: First, the caregiver teaches the elephant to associate the sound of a cli
cking device with a treat, like an apple. The purpose of the clicking device—called a “bridge”—is to let the elephant know the exact moment it has completed the desired behavior. The caregiver begins by clicking and giving the elephant a treat.
Click: treat.
Click: treat.
Click: treat.
The caregiver does this until the elephant reaches out her trunk for a treat whenever she hears a click.
Then, the caregiver touches the elephant’s leg with a stick (or “target pole”).
Stick: click: treat.
Stick: click: treat.
Stick: click: treat.
Finally, the caregiver holds the stick a few inches away from the elephant’s leg and says “foot.” Then, the caregiver waits.
“Foot.”
“Foot.”
If and when the elephant finally lifts her leg to touch the stick, click: treat.
Using a roughly similar method, Kelly was training some of the elephants to receive treatment for their tuberculosis. The elephants needed a course of medication, but they had refused to swallow the foul-tasting pills. So once a day, seven days a week, each infected elephant had been trained to wait patiently while Kelly or another caregiver inserted her rubber-clad arm into the elephant’s rectum. According to Kelly, the elephants did not enjoy receiving this treatment any more than she enjoyed administering it.II In the long coevolution of humans and elephants on this planet, this is where we have ended up. First, we ran from them, then we hunted them, then we enslaved them; and now we—some of us, at least—do disgusting things to keep them alive.