In 2024, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research documented five cases of Asian elephants burying their dead calves. The elephants positioned the calves into muddy trenches, covered them with earth—leaving only the legs protruding—and then stood over the burial sites for extended periods. Footprints around the carcasses confirmed that adult elephants had spent considerable time at the locations. In one case, the adults trumpeted for nearly 60 minutes—sustained, unbroken vocalizations of the kind elephants don’t produce during routine social interaction. The study, published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, provided the first systematic documentation of intentional burial behavior in Asian elephants. The calves were not abandoned. They were interred.
This is the kind of evidence that makes the question of animal grief impossible to dismiss and difficult to answer. The elephants’ behavior meets every behavioral criterion a scientist could reasonably apply: they altered their routine in response to death, they attended the body, they performed sustained and unusual vocalizations, and they engaged in deliberate physical manipulation of the remains that serves no obvious survival function. If a human community performed the same sequence—gathering around a body, vocalizing, burying the dead, standing vigil—no one would hesitate to call it mourning. The question is whether using that word for elephants is scientific description or anthropomorphic projection.
What elephants do around their dead
The behavioral record is extensive enough to establish patterns rather than anecdotes.
Elephants investigate the bones of dead elephants—touching them with their trunks, lifting them, carrying them, sometimes moving them to new locations. They do this with the remains of relatives and non-relatives alike, and they do it with old bones as well as fresh carcasses. Critically, they don’t do it with the bones of other species. Whatever is happening when an elephant examines elephant remains, it’s species-specific. The trunks that can detect vibrations through the ground, identify individual elephants by scent at distances of miles, and manipulate objects with the dexterity of a human hand are deployed over bones in patterns that researchers consistently describe as careful, deliberate, and sustained.
When an elephant dies within a social group, the surviving members frequently refuse to leave the body. They stand over it for hours or days. They touch the carcass with their trunks repeatedly—the face, the ears, the mouth. They sometimes attempt to lift the dead animal or push it to its feet. Some researchers have observed elephants placing grass, leaves, and branches over the bodies, partially covering them. Others have documented elephants guarding carcasses from predators.
The behavioral changes extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the body. After a death, herd members have been observed eating less, moving more slowly, showing reduced social interaction, and producing vocalizations described by researchers as unusually quiet and subdued—grumbling, low-frequency sounds distinct from normal communication calls. Marc Bekoff, an animal behavior expert, described observing a herd whose matriarch had died: “Their heads were down, ears drooping, tails hanging listlessly, and they were just walking here and there, moping around, apparently brokenhearted.” The behavioral shift persisted for days.
Elephants also produce temporal gland secretions during encounters with dead elephants—fluid that streams from glands on the sides of the head, associated with states of heightened emotional arousal including stress, excitement, and what researchers cautiously describe as distress. Some observers have reported what appears to be tear production, though whether this represents emotional crying or a stress-related physiological response is unresolved.
The Lawrence Anthony episode
When conservationist Lawrence Anthony—known as “The Elephant Whisperer”—died suddenly in March 2012, the two herds of once-aggressive rogue African elephants he had rehabilitated at his Thula Thula reserve in South Africa traveled roughly 12 hours through the Zululand bush to arrive at his home. They hadn’t visited in over a year. They appeared on the day of his death and remained for what observers described as a two-day vigil. The timing and distance traveled are difficult to reconcile with coincidence, though how the elephants could have known of Anthony’s death—he died indoors, miles from where the herds were ranging—remains unexplained.
The Anthony story is frequently cited in popular accounts of elephant grief and is worth noting precisely because it illustrates both the power and the limit of the evidence. The elephants’ arrival was real and documented. The interpretation—that they somehow learned of his death and traveled to mourn him—requires a mechanism that no one has identified. Elephants have extraordinary sensory capabilities, including infrasound communication over distances of miles and the ability to detect seismic vibrations through their feet. Whether any of these could account for detecting a human death at the reported distance is unknown. The episode is compelling enough to report and uncertain enough to resist a clean conclusion, which is where most of the honest evidence for animal grief sits.
The scientific problem with grief
Anthropologist Barbara J. King proposed a definition that has become the field’s working standard: to qualify as grief, surviving individuals who knew the deceased must alter their behavioral routine—eating or sleeping less, acting listless or agitated, attending the body. By this behavioral definition, elephants grieve. So do chimpanzees (who become subdued and eat less after a death in the group), dolphins (who carry dead calves for days or weeks), orcas (who push dead newborns for hours, refusing to let them sink), gorillas (Koko the gorilla became “very somber” with “her lip quivering” when told of Robin Williams’s death), wolves (whose surviving pack members show measurable behavioral depression after losing a companion), and corvids (crows gather around their dead in what researchers have called “funerals,” though the function appears to be threat assessment rather than mourning).
King’s definition is useful because it’s measurable. It’s also deliberately agnostic about subjective experience—it describes what the animal does, not what the animal feels. This distinction is the central methodological problem. Grief, in humans, is an internal experience—a subjective state of emotional pain, longing, and loss. We can’t access the subjective experience of another species. We can only observe behavior and infer. The inference is strong when the behavior is complex, sustained, species-specific, and functionally unnecessary—which is why elephant bone investigation, calf burial, and extended vigils are so compelling. There’s no obvious survival benefit to standing over a dead body for two days or carrying bones from one location to another. The behavior suggests something beyond curiosity or confusion, but “beyond curiosity” is not the same as “grief in the way humans experience it.”
Elephants have von Economo neurons—specialized brain cells previously documented only in humans, great apes, and cetaceans, associated with empathy, social awareness, and self-recognition. Their brains are the largest of any land animal, roughly three times the mass of a human brain, with a highly developed hippocampus (the structure associated with memory and emotion). They recognize individual elephants after years of separation. They form lifelong social bonds. They have the neurological infrastructure that, in every other species where it appears, is associated with complex emotional processing.
What we’re actually arguing about
The debate over animal grief is not about whether the behaviors exist—they’re documented, filmed, published, and reproducible. The debate is about whether the word “grief” applies to what’s happening inside the animal’s mind, and that debate is ultimately about consciousness: whether elephants (and apes, and cetaceans, and corvids) have subjective emotional experiences that are analogous to ours, or whether they have sophisticated behavioral responses to social disruption that look like grief from the outside but feel like nothing from the inside.
The emerging scientific consensus, as surveyed by Emory University, is moving toward the former. Most researchers who study animal cognition now accept that many species possess emotional experiences with subjective qualities. The question has shifted from “do animals have emotions?” to “how do animal emotions compare to human experiences?” The answer is probably: similar in kind, different in degree, and impossible to access directly because we can’t be an elephant any more than we can be a bat.
What the evidence supports is this: elephants respond to death with behaviors that are sustained, deliberate, species-specific, neurologically supported, and functionally unnecessary for survival. They bury their calves. They stand vigil over bodies. They return to bones years later and touch them with the organ most sensitive to individual identity they possess. They alter their behavior for days or weeks after a loss. Whether this constitutes grief depends on whether you require the subjective experience to use the word, and that requirement is a philosophical choice, not a scientific one. The elephants’ behavior doesn’t change based on which choice you make.
We cover elephant mourning alongside orangutan self-medication, baboon politics, and the full landscape of animal cognition across our Animal Culture & Knowledge course—including why the hardest question in the study of animal minds isn’t what they do. It’s what they feel.