I used to think grief was exclusively human.
Then I watched footage from Samburu National Reserve in Kenya, where a matriarch named Eleanor collapsed from illness, and what happened next rewrote everything I thought I knew about animal emotion. Her family didn’t just acknowledge her death—they stayed with her body for days, touching her with their trunks, trying to lift her, refusing to leave even as the sun baked the savanna and predators circled at a distance. One young female tried repeatedly to raise Eleanor’s body with her tusks, a gesture so deliberate and so futile it felt uncomfortably familiar. Researchers documented the family returning to her bones weeks later, running their trunk tips over her skull with what looked unmistakably like tenderness, and I realized we’d been drastically underestimating what goes on inside an elephant’s mind.
Turns out, this isn’t rare behavior. It’s pattern. Elephants across Africa and Asia have been observed performing what can only be described as funerary rituals, and the consistency is startling.
Here’s the thing: elephant brains have a highly developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex, regions associated with memory and emotional processing in humans, but they also possess specialized structures we’re only beginning to understand. The temporal lobe in elephants is proportionally larger than ours, which might explain their extraordinary recall—they can recognize the bones of deceased family members years after death, distinguishing them from the remains of strangers. Joyce Poole, who’s spent decades studying elephant behavior in Amboseli, documented families spending hours examining the ivory and bones of their dead, sometimes carrying tusks for short distances before gently placing them down again. Wait—maybe this is just curiosity? Except the behavior is too specific, too reverent, and it only happens with elephant remains, not with other large mammals.
The neurochemistry probably mirrors ours more than we’d expect, though we can’t exactly scan a grieving elephant’s brain in the wild. We do know they have spindle neurons—the same cells linked to empathy, self-awareness, and social suffering in great apes and humans. These neurons are concentrated in the same brain regions, and elephants have more of them than we do, which is honestly a little humbling. When a calf dies, mothers have been observed carrying the body for days, refusing to feed, vocalizing in low frequencies that sound like mourning even to human ears, and displaying physiological stress responses—elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep patterns—that match what we see in bereaved humans.
But maybe the most unsettling evidence comes from their relationship with bones.
Elephants don’t just pause at carcasses—they actively investigate skeletal remains, even in areas where poaching has left bones scattered for years. Researchers in Tanzania recorded a family spending an entire afternoon with the remains of a matriarch killed by poachers, touching each bone methodically, standing in silence for long stretches, and eventually covering parts of the skeleton with branches and dirt. This isn’t scavenging or territorial behavior; it’s ritualistic, and it happens with a frequency that suggests it’s culturally transmitted. Young elephants watch older ones perform these actions and later replicate them, which implies learned behavior rather than pure instinct. Ian Douglas-Hamilton described a case where elephants returned to a death site annually for five years, always during the same season, always performing the same careful examination of what little remained. I guess it makes sense when you consider that elephant societies are matriarchal and knowledge-based—older females teach the young where to find water, how to read weather patterns, and apparently, how to honor the dead.
There’s also the problem of captivity trauma, which reveals just how deeply death affects them. Elephants in zoos have been observed becoming depressed after the loss of companions, refusing food, rocking compulsively, and in some documented cases, dying shortly after without clear physical cause—what researchers reluctantly call “broken heart syndrome.” The same thing happens in the wild when poachers kill matriarchs; the surviving family members often struggle to function, making poor navigational decisions and showing signs of what we’d definately call PTSD in humans. Elephants remember trauma across decades, and they seem to recieve no evolutionary benefit from prolonged mourning, which makes the behavior all the more profound—it’s not strategic, it’s emotional.
What’s left is the uncomfortable realization that we share grief with creatures we’ve spent centuries exploiting.
