“There is no creature among all the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of almighty God as the elephant.”
- Edward Topsell, English cleric and naturalist
Elephants are of the very few animals that can have altruism marked upon both their character & biological profiles. While its presence in elephant society for social structuring seems to ‘explain away’ their behavior, even those closely associated with them believe the animals possess a kindness towards other animals unlike any other in the kingdom – and that seems all the more admirable for human society.
There is an instance in India where work elephants were assisting villagers in transporting logs and one elephant resolutely disobeyed his mahout to lower a log into a hole: upon the mahout’s inspection, the elephant halted because a napping dog was curled up in the hole; there have also been multiple accounts of elephants looking after injured researchers and tourists in game preserves where the animals gather around the fallen and gently rub the tips of their trunks over them for comfort.
In the study of animal intelligence or cognitive ethology (again an indicator that human/non-human relations are on the mend), it seems that we should have known there was something special about elephants from the beginning.
Stanford University Overview of Animal Altruism & Its Biology: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
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