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Asian elephants mourn, bury their dead calves: Study
- catchnear4321 3y agoare we going to start trying with more than whales? long overdue, but also at a point where there is a plausible chance of success.
- londons_explore 3y agoBurying dead prevents predators eating the body and getting a taste for your flesh...
- BlackjackCF 3y agoThat’s dark but… huh I never thought about it that way. I thought it was more of a disease prevention thing due to rot.
- DamnYuppie 3y agoA more reasonable explanation is that it has been found that all animals are repulsed by the sent of their dead. This is true for fish all the way up to humans. Burying them greatly reduces the odor they release while decomposing.
- vincebowdren 3y agoMaybe? But a few things count against that hypothesis. Elephants are already very mobile animals, so they can simply move away if they don't like the smell; dislike of the smell would, you'd think, drive them to move away rather than remaining with the corpse, moving it around, and trumpeting loudly. Secondly, do elephants do that with other animal corpses they discover in their travels? We would expect not, though this would need observation and trials to find out for sure. Thirdly, does this way of burying the corpse make it more difficult for scavenging animals to discover the corpse? If so, that counts for the other hypothesis.
- vincebowdren 3y agoRelevant: https://meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/ https://meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/