7 ms·

If you were an elephant

163 points by Thevet 10y ago

davidcollantes 10y ago
What a lovely piece! It would be interesting to read a series, each with a different animal.
- kej 10y ago
  You'd probably enjoy the author's book Being a Beast[1], then: [1] https://www.amazon.com/Being-Beast-Charles-Foster-ebook/dp/B0158PV7VM https://www.amazon.com/Being-Beast-Charles-Foster-ebook/dp/B...
xutopia 10y ago
This is a worthwhile long read. If you're done reading it consider for a moment how they feel their environment quite differently than we do. Their eyes aren't their most important sense. Their trunks is how they sense most things. Consider how our own bodies are capable of sensing so much from our surroundings with touch alone and how little we make use of it.
- evincarofautumn 10y ago
  Do people generally consider sight to be our most important sense? I certainly don’t—but I have synesthesia, so maybe I have to rely on more senses to get a clear picture of things. For example, I might fill up a glass by sound, identify one of my shirts by feel, or recognise a person by smell. I bet neurotypical people do this too, but if asked, they would attribute it mainly to sight.
  - kbutler 10y ago
    View sight as most important? yes - it's the window (ahem) to the world, including highest bandwidth information delivery. Fill up a glass by sound? yes, but except in rare cases, it's supplemental Identify shirt by feel? Only if I didn't turn on the light - Yes, I can recognize the shirt I'm wearing by feel, or can tell what shirt I've grabbed out of the laundry basket while watching TV, but I definitely choose the shirt to wear by sight. Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first.
    - evincarofautumn 10y ago
      That’s interesting, thanks. I guess I don’t bother to turn on a light if I don’t intend to spend much time in a room, like if I’m just getting a glass of water, or grabbing something whose location I know. (And I’m actually pretty bad at looking for something with my eyes if I forget where it is.) > Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first. Haha, of course. I was thinking more along the lines of “Somebody left a sweatshirt at my apartment after the party—whose is it?”
  - ozborn 10y ago
    Yes. It's been reported that 30% of the human brain is dedicated to visual processing, more than all of the other senses put together. I think also most input to the brain from the visual system.
cjauvin 10y ago
I really found that read interesting and also quite moving. Elephants are mysterious and noble animals, and it's very philosophically fulfilling to ponder about their mind and the deep chasm that separates it from ours. I sometimes have the idea that our notions of animal rights and the respect they deserve will soon undergo some rapid and deep evolution, in parts fueled by science and technology (AI for instance, which will necessarily transform our view of the mind, and its essence). I've also been quite influenced in that respect by the recent read of Yuval Harari's books (Sapiens and Homo Deus), in which he beautifully discusses the mind of animals and its implication for us.
bergoid 10y ago
The writer ruined it for me at the end of the article by casually arguing for the existence of telepathy with a couple of vague anecdotes.
- awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
  The article it links to higher up (the part about the tribe knowing what the hunters killed from 50 miles away) is a fascinating read about telepathy that vacillates between vaguely scientific analysis and outright fantasy. I enjoyed it from a "well, that's a fun perspective to view the world from" standpoint.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    The specific Kalahari example in the linked article makes a claim without presenting any evidence; I was bummed, because I was really curious about their methodology. (Turns out there isn't any; it's just a 'synthesized' personal account of one author.) Elephant "ESP" can be explained by infra-sound, however: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/infrasound.html http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/...
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  It didn't ruin it for me, but it did throw me for a loop. I'm assuming that the elephants are communicating over long distances with infrasonics, and that over very long ranges, they may be relaying them for others.
whack 10y ago
"When the temporal glands near their eyes stream in circumstances that, for us, would be emotional, they’re crying. When a bereaved elephant mother carries her dead baby round on her tusks, or trails miserably behind the herd for weeks, her head hanging down, she’s grieving. When other elephants sit for hours around the body of a dead elephant, they’re mourning. When they cover an elephant corpse with soil or vegetation, or move elephant bones, they’re being reverential. When they cover a dead human, or build a protective wall of sticks around a wounded human, they’re showing an empathic acknowledgment of our shared destiny that we’d do well to learn... If you were an elephant... be careful, though. You’re likely to end up dead because someone wants a couple of your teeth." That was beautifully written.
- refurb 10y ago
  That was beautifully written. That was ascribing human emotions and behaviors to animals without a lot of evidence. It reminds me of this photo[1]. People thought the male was hugging the dying female in a fit of grief. So touching. When they asked animal experts, it turns out the male was actually forcing the female to mate. In human terms we call that rape. [1] http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/dying-kangaroos-sad-goodbye-captured-by-hervey-bay-local/news-story/1093d41f649c3a54fb509f84e27879f2 http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/dying-kanga...
  - pilom 10y ago
    Just because animals have rape doesn't meant they don't also have grief.
    - chordatum 10y ago
      Animals don't exactly have the same willpower and reputation requirements that one finds in typically civilized human social order. If animals have rape, it's a subset of human-on-human rape, and carries fewer of the nuanced consequences of rape among humans. Psychological trauma is probably not even in the equation when it comes to rape among most animals below a certain level of intelligence, particularly when considering untamed animals. Due to the minimal psychological aspects, which assuredly are a hallmark of human-on-human rape, and the bald fact that the very word "rape" itself carries loaded connotations when considered as a concept by humans, I wonder if it is appropriate to use the same word for variations of sexual intercourse and related behavior among wild animals.
adamnemecek 10y ago
Too bad they are getting slaughtered left and right. If the next 10 years are as bad as the last, they will be extinct in the wild. You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed. There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little cutie [5][6]. [0] http://www.iapf.org/ http://www.iapf.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander [3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/ http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust [5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp?N=318 http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp... [6] https://www.instagram.com/p/BPoboF8j84H https://www.instagram.com/p/BPoboF8j84H You should also check out https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs for your daily dose of pachyderm based content.
- cgopalan 10y ago
  > You can for example sponsor this little fella Done.
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    Thanks so much!
- cjauvin 10y ago
  > You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. Done, thanks!
stcredzero 10y ago
A nearby human would throb like a bodhran as subsonic waves bounced around her chest. If only that were more typical. What I see in the western parts of the US are lots of beginner players who are afraid to tune their strident, high pitched, pingy drums. (Also some good players.)
subjectsigma 10y ago
To be honest, stuff like this really annoys me. I'm incredibly interested in animal minds (I just started reading that book that was posted a while back, Other Minds, about octopuses and consciousness, and I'm really liking it.) And of course, I think that poaching should be illegal and that we should protect and conserve the environment. But... > … the world would be a brighter, smellier, noisier place – and you would be a better, wiser, kinder person No, I wouldn't be a 'better ... person', I would be an elephant! Elephants have not created great works of art, literature, architecture, and poetry. Elephants have no written language, cannot build complex machines, and have not traveled to other worlds, or even explored their own. People have done incredible things with their bodies and minds in a way that animals simply cannot, period. This is (arguably) all a consequence of evolution being a competition, and humans being predators. People like to fight and win, to be better than something else. And while it would be great if human nature was just competitive enough to produce results, but not make humans physically violent, that would be fantastic! But I don't think evolution can exactly fine-tune something like that. This happens every time that animal consciousness is discussed: somebody tries to claim that the animals in question have a completely different way of life than humans, and that their way of life is 'better', usually because they are peaceful, and that you are arrogant and ignorant if you don't agree. I think that's horseshit. This would be almost tolerable if it didn't have the subtle feminist jabs hidden in there with the smug moral superiority - "As a boy, your function would be to inseminate, and that's all. Government would be the business of the females." As if being a walking pair of testes was somehow more noble than fighting, struggling, learning, winning, like human boys do. Stop all those pesky masculine behaviors, you "infantile phallocentric [nihilist]." Just be good and dumb and stay where you are.
- dibujante 10y ago
  Yeah, that was unexpectedly inflammatory. "Elephant society is better than human society because it disenfranchises half of its members."
- elephant_man 10y ago
  > Elephants have not created.... Neither do they slaughter one another in their millions, which is the precise point of the quote that apparently went over your head. And elephants do things with their bodies and minds that people do not do: numerous examples were provided. And you exhibit little understanding of how evolution actually works. Kindly educate yourself about the role of mechanisms like cooperation and symbiosis in driving the "advancement" (sic) of species. And your axe-grinding about feminism is just silly and semi-hysterical and basically tiresome. Please just take that somewhere else. Stuff like this really annoys the rest of us.
NoGravitas 10y ago
In the grand thing of things, we're not that distantly related to elephants, so it's not that surprising we can relate to each others' minds, and imagine what it would be to be an elephant. I'm trying to imagine some harder ones; animals that we can tell are highly intelligent but are more distantly related. If you were a crow. If you were an octopus.

163 points by Thevet 10y ago

davidcollantes 10y ago

What a lovely piece! It would be interesting to read a series, each with a different animal.

kej 10y ago
You'd probably enjoy the author's book Being a Beast[1], then: [1] https://www.amazon.com/Being-Beast-Charles-Foster-ebook/dp/B0158PV7VM https://www.amazon.com/Being-Beast-Charles-Foster-ebook/dp/B...

xutopia 10y ago

This is a worthwhile long read. If you're done reading it consider for a moment how they feel their environment quite differently than we do. Their eyes aren't their most important sense. Their trunks is how they sense most things. Consider how our own bodies are capable of sensing so much from our surroundings with touch alone and how little we make use of it.

evincarofautumn 10y ago
Do people generally consider sight to be our most important sense? I certainly don’t—but I have synesthesia, so maybe I have to rely on more senses to get a clear picture of things. For example, I might fill up a glass by sound, identify one of my shirts by feel, or recognise a person by smell. I bet neurotypical people do this too, but if asked, they would attribute it mainly to sight.
- kbutler 10y ago
  View sight as most important? yes - it's the window (ahem) to the world, including highest bandwidth information delivery. Fill up a glass by sound? yes, but except in rare cases, it's supplemental Identify shirt by feel? Only if I didn't turn on the light - Yes, I can recognize the shirt I'm wearing by feel, or can tell what shirt I've grabbed out of the laundry basket while watching TV, but I definitely choose the shirt to wear by sight. Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first.
  - evincarofautumn 10y ago
    That’s interesting, thanks. I guess I don’t bother to turn on a light if I don’t intend to spend much time in a room, like if I’m just getting a glass of water, or grabbing something whose location I know. (And I’m actually pretty bad at looking for something with my eyes if I forget where it is.) > Recognize a person by smell? Almost always see them first. Haha, of course. I was thinking more along the lines of “Somebody left a sweatshirt at my apartment after the party—whose is it?”
- ozborn 10y ago
  Yes. It's been reported that 30% of the human brain is dedicated to visual processing, more than all of the other senses put together. I think also most input to the brain from the visual system.

cjauvin 10y ago

I really found that read interesting and also quite moving. Elephants are mysterious and noble animals, and it's very philosophically fulfilling to ponder about their mind and the deep chasm that separates it from ours. I sometimes have the idea that our notions of animal rights and the respect they deserve will soon undergo some rapid and deep evolution, in parts fueled by science and technology (AI for instance, which will necessarily transform our view of the mind, and its essence). I've also been quite influenced in that respect by the recent read of Yuval Harari's books (Sapiens and Homo Deus), in which he beautifully discusses the mind of animals and its implication for us.

bergoid 10y ago

The writer ruined it for me at the end of the article by casually arguing for the existence of telepathy with a couple of vague anecdotes.

awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
The article it links to higher up (the part about the tribe knowing what the hunters killed from 50 miles away) is a fascinating read about telepathy that vacillates between vaguely scientific analysis and outright fantasy. I enjoyed it from a "well, that's a fun perspective to view the world from" standpoint.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  The specific Kalahari example in the linked article makes a claim without presenting any evidence; I was bummed, because I was really curious about their methodology. (Turns out there isn't any; it's just a 'synthesized' personal account of one author.) Elephant "ESP" can be explained by infra-sound, however: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/infrasound.html http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp/elephant/cyclotis/language/...
NoGravitas 10y ago
It didn't ruin it for me, but it did throw me for a loop. I'm assuming that the elephants are communicating over long distances with infrasonics, and that over very long ranges, they may be relaying them for others.

whack 10y ago

"When the temporal glands near their eyes stream in circumstances that, for us, would be emotional, they’re crying. When a bereaved elephant mother carries her dead baby round on her tusks, or trails miserably behind the herd for weeks, her head hanging down, she’s grieving. When other elephants sit for hours around the body of a dead elephant, they’re mourning. When they cover an elephant corpse with soil or vegetation, or move elephant bones, they’re being reverential. When they cover a dead human, or build a protective wall of sticks around a wounded human, they’re showing an empathic acknowledgment of our shared destiny that we’d do well to learn... If you were an elephant... be careful, though. You’re likely to end up dead because someone wants a couple of your teeth." That was beautifully written.

refurb 10y ago
That was beautifully written. That was ascribing human emotions and behaviors to animals without a lot of evidence. It reminds me of this photo[1]. People thought the male was hugging the dying female in a fit of grief. So touching. When they asked animal experts, it turns out the male was actually forcing the female to mate. In human terms we call that rape. [1] http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/dying-kangaroos-sad-goodbye-captured-by-hervey-bay-local/news-story/1093d41f649c3a54fb509f84e27879f2 http://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/science/dying-kanga...
- pilom 10y ago
  Just because animals have rape doesn't meant they don't also have grief.
  - chordatum 10y ago
    Animals don't exactly have the same willpower and reputation requirements that one finds in typically civilized human social order. If animals have rape, it's a subset of human-on-human rape, and carries fewer of the nuanced consequences of rape among humans. Psychological trauma is probably not even in the equation when it comes to rape among most animals below a certain level of intelligence, particularly when considering untamed animals. Due to the minimal psychological aspects, which assuredly are a hallmark of human-on-human rape, and the bald fact that the very word "rape" itself carries loaded connotations when considered as a concept by humans, I wonder if it is appropriate to use the same word for variations of sexual intercourse and related behavior among wild animals.

adamnemecek 10y ago

Too bad they are getting slaughtered left and right. If the next 10 years are as bad as the last, they will be extinct in the wild. You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed. There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little cutie [5][6]. [0] http://www.iapf.org/ http://www.iapf.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander [3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/ http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust [5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp?N=318 http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp... [6] https://www.instagram.com/p/BPoboF8j84H https://www.instagram.com/p/BPoboF8j84H You should also check out https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs https://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs for your daily dose of pachyderm based content.

cgopalan 10y ago
> You can for example sponsor this little fella Done.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  Thanks so much!
cjauvin 10y ago
> You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. Done, thanks!

stcredzero 10y ago

A nearby human would throb like a bodhran as subsonic waves bounced around her chest. If only that were more typical. What I see in the western parts of the US are lots of beginner players who are afraid to tune their strident, high pitched, pingy drums. (Also some good players.)

subjectsigma 10y ago

To be honest, stuff like this really annoys me. I'm incredibly interested in animal minds (I just started reading that book that was posted a while back, Other Minds, about octopuses and consciousness, and I'm really liking it.) And of course, I think that poaching should be illegal and that we should protect and conserve the environment. But... > … the world would be a brighter, smellier, noisier place – and you would be a better, wiser, kinder person No, I wouldn't be a 'better ... person', I would be an elephant! Elephants have not created great works of art, literature, architecture, and poetry. Elephants have no written language, cannot build complex machines, and have not traveled to other worlds, or even explored their own. People have done incredible things with their bodies and minds in a way that animals simply cannot, period. This is (arguably) all a consequence of evolution being a competition, and humans being predators. People like to fight and win, to be better than something else. And while it would be great if human nature was just competitive enough to produce results, but not make humans physically violent, that would be fantastic! But I don't think evolution can exactly fine-tune something like that. This happens every time that animal consciousness is discussed: somebody tries to claim that the animals in question have a completely different way of life than humans, and that their way of life is 'better', usually because they are peaceful, and that you are arrogant and ignorant if you don't agree. I think that's horseshit. This would be almost tolerable if it didn't have the subtle feminist jabs hidden in there with the smug moral superiority - "As a boy, your function would be to inseminate, and that's all. Government would be the business of the females." As if being a walking pair of testes was somehow more noble than fighting, struggling, learning, winning, like human boys do. Stop all those pesky masculine behaviors, you "infantile phallocentric [nihilist]." Just be good and dumb and stay where you are.

dibujante 10y ago
Yeah, that was unexpectedly inflammatory. "Elephant society is better than human society because it disenfranchises half of its members."
elephant_man 10y ago
> Elephants have not created.... Neither do they slaughter one another in their millions, which is the precise point of the quote that apparently went over your head. And elephants do things with their bodies and minds that people do not do: numerous examples were provided. And you exhibit little understanding of how evolution actually works. Kindly educate yourself about the role of mechanisms like cooperation and symbiosis in driving the "advancement" (sic) of species. And your axe-grinding about feminism is just silly and semi-hysterical and basically tiresome. Please just take that somewhere else. Stuff like this really annoys the rest of us.

NoGravitas 10y ago

In the grand thing of things, we're not that distantly related to elephants, so it's not that surprising we can relate to each others' minds, and imagine what it would be to be an elephant. I'm trying to imagine some harder ones; animals that we can tell are highly intelligent but are more distantly related. If you were a crow. If you were an octopus.