Being an ‘animal person’ lends itself to easily anthropomorphize animals as relating their actions to human behavior – this practice is not helpful for either animal advocacy or scientific analysis because whatever connection or similarity an elephant, dog or pig may exhibit, they are exhibiting it through their own species’ filter, the simple fact of the matter being they are an animal through and through.
But denying the existence of human-like behaviors in animals is just as deleterious (if not more so) since drawing such a divisive line between us and them both denies our mammalian heritage and is an ethically unfair judgment based on pure speciesism. Humans are so accustomed to their own behaviors that witnessing similarities in non-humans sparks the initial “he thinks he’s people” line of homocentric thought. We often fail to realize that the large amounts of DNA shared between Homo sapiens and the other mammalian families account for so much of what makes us perceive to be unique ourselves.
Case in point: outside of humans, elephants are the only known animals to exhibit an intimate connection with their dead and carry out ritualized funerals for their deceased. Humans, like elephants, are highly social animals with intimate family ties and a similarly long lifespan sadly guarantees that one will have to experience grief through losing a loved one.
In the wild, elephants have a highly regimented and long-lasting grieving period once a member of the herd passes: after an initial period of disbelief where the herd attempts to rouse the dead or stand them up, they become crushingly silent and encircle the body, tenderly stroking it with their trunks. Younger elephants, particularly those closely related to the deceased such as offspring, have been documented as emitting plaintive weeping sounds and even adult elephants sometimes exhibit streaks of ‘tears’ running down from their eyes and sweat glands on their temples. The funeral party will conclude when the herd covers the body with dirt & tree branches and only then will they leave the site.
E-Magazine Covering Cognitive Ethology History in Animal Studies: http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3702
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