Eli5: why is it that elephants are considered to be the emotionally intelligent animal species?
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Not an expert by any means, but from what I know it’s how they care for their young, grieve their dead, and help each other in distress. Go watch some stuff on YouTube about it; it’s pretty incredible.
To put it shortly, because they’ve shown us that they are.
Elephants are highly social. They live in tight family groups, meet up with friendly herds, travel together, look out for each other. They live long enough to develop individual knowledge of their environment and how to thrive in it, and that combined with their long life means they are able to pass their knowledge down to younger generations.
Elephants and some other species that live in tight knit groups have a concept of who they are in relation to the group. Each individual in the group is a “someone”, not just “another”. Wolves are another example, and there was a case where the death of a single wolf in Yellowstone NP caused changes in the social dynamics of several packs. Elephants mourn the loss of one of their own, some herds even bury their dead under branches and leaves, and they travel back to their “graveyards” to touch the teeth of the deceased. While that may seem strange, it is believed that elephants use their teeth to recognise and greet each other by running their trunks over each other’s teeth as a part of their greeting ceremony. So when visiting the graves of deceased family members, they are greeting and recognising them individually.
There is also something called theory of mind, and we believe elephants have that. (Personally I think it applies to many more species as well but that’s a different debate). Theory of mind describes the ability of an individual to understand another individual has motivations, desires, and emotions of its own, and that they can be different from your own. In layman’s terms, an elephant is able to understand that you, a human in a safari car driving by, have no interest in eating leaves and rolling in dirt and swimming in a waterhole, but instead are interested in sitting in your car and staying on the fort path for some reason. The elephant may not understand why you’re interested in that, but it is able to adjust its own behaviour to what it thinks is on your mind.
Aside from what we’ve observed in their behaviour, we also studied their brains and realised they have a highly developed brain, with a large prefrontal cortex (the part that controls social skills) not unlike our own. So it’s not a crazy connection to draw that they must have similar social abilities.
If you are interested in the social aspects of elephants, I highly recommend Carl Safina’s book Beyond Words. Superbly written and based on solid scientific research
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