Asian elephants mourn loudly for their dead calves and bury them with a sort of funeral rite: this is demonstrated by the study of five burials of cubs under one year of age, carried out between 2022 and 2023 in the northern Bengal region of India.
The findings are published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa by Parveen Kaswan of the Indian Forest Service and Akashdeep Roy of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research.
The puppies, who died of natural causes, were buried in the irrigation canals of the tea plantations, hundreds of meters away from human settlements.
In all five cases, the cub's carcass was carried by the pack, dragged by its legs and trunk, and then buried in an unusual supine position.
During one of these 'funerals', members of the pack bellowed loudly around the buried cub.
The footprints of around twenty specimens have been identified near and above the mounds.
In all five cases examined, the herd moved away within 40 minutes of the burial and subsequently avoided returning to the same area.
Elephants are known for their social and cooperative behavior, but calf burial had previously only been briefly studied in African elephants, remaining unexplored in their Asian cousins.
Wild elephants in both Africa and Asia are known to visit carcasses at different times much like visiting a grave, but this study found markedly different behaviors than those already known.
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