Discussion
Environmental change and land-use patterns often bring novel behaviour to the limelight. This study highlights one such behaviour of carcass burial by Asian elephants in the TGs of north Bengal. We present confirmed anecdotes of carcass burials by elephants in the North Bengal region. We reported four similar case reports to show the carcasses’ strange’ legs-upright-position’ and investigated the details of such behaviour. Elephants are social animals, and their cooperative behaviour has been widely published in scholarly articles. However, the ’calf burial’ component of thanatology remains briefly studied for African elephants and untouched for Asian elephants. In this section, we compare our case reports with the existing literature on thanatology in two sub-sections, namely – (1) perimortem and (2) postmortem behaviour.
Perimortem behaviour: Calf burial and other comparisons
In a first-ever recorded photographic and postmortem examination evidence of deceased calf burials by Asian elephants, the study contributes to the existing ’faint’ knowledge about calf burials by elephants globally. Through direct and indirect evidence, this study highlights elephants’ helping and compassionate behaviour during the ceremonial burial of the carcass. A few generalities have to be made about Asian elephants’ calf burial behaviour arising from the four case reports presented above.
We state that Asian elephants carry their deceased calves to isolated locations away from humans and carnivores while searching trenches and depressions to bury the carcass. Caring for and carrying the dead offspring has been reported in both altricial (mostly primates: Chimpanzees, baboons, and macaques) (Watts 2019; Carter et al. 2020) and precocial (elephants, giraffe, and peccaries, for instance) offspring (Watson and Matsuzawa 2018; Bercovitch 2020). There are unpublished reports from the West Bengal Forest Department of an elephant cow carrying the carcass for up to two days before leaving it in an isolated location in south Bengal (Figure 6). Its worth noting that only calves are carried and the young adults/adults are not due to non-feseability. In most cases, these sentient beings do not leave the carcass until putrefaction starts in the deceased calf or is taken over by the forest department officials. Such affinity towards their offspring is attributed to oxytocin and prolonged gestation period (Bercovitch 2020). Such hormonal response aligns with other studies on Chacma baboons (Carter et al. 2020), Olive baboons (Papio Anubis ), African elephants, and Thornicroft’s giraffe (Girafa camelopardalis ) (Bercovitch 2020). Published scholarships on African elephants have reported calf burials in rare cases (Douglas-Hamilton & Douglas-Hamilton, 1975), but such literature remains absent from Asian context (Sharma et al. 2019).
Our findings also suggest that the modified land-use types, such as tea gardens, offer inclusivity and provide extended forest cover for elephant movement. There are no trenches inside the PAs, and it’s exceptionally challenging to locate burial activities/sites inside the closed canopy of semi-evergreen and moist deciduous forests of north Bengal - quite similar to why thanatological studies have briefly touched upon the less populated African forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis ) (Hawley et al. 2016). Through extensive patrolling by the forest guards such deceased calves are often detached from the herd to ensure normal elephant migration and the subsequent crowd management which would have occured on seeing such ‘novel’ behaviuor. With ample trenches and no forest officials, the tea gardens, in these cases, emerge to be a perfect land-use type for burying the carcass. In addition to such ceremonial burials by elephants, the TGs of north Bengal also witness elephant births – thus, providing a common ground for life and death.
The most interesting finding of our study was the positioning of the carcasses in a ’legs-upright-position’ in the limited space in the tea gardens. The locals and many conservation gatekeepers often perceive these ceremonial burials as’ accidental’. The ’strange’ positioning of the carcass could be explained for better grip for the herd member(s) to hold and lay the calf in the trench. This strategic behaviour also reflects the care and affection of the herd member(s) towards the deceased conspecific. This behaviour suggests that in a situation of space crunch, the herd member(s) prioritize the head for the ceremonial burial before the feet. Elephants are caring social animals, and based on external examination of the carcasses, we also suggest that the calves were placed delicately by gripping one or more legs by the herd member(s). However, we observed petechial haemorrhagic lesions and contusions on the dorsal side of the carcass in all the cases. The contusions in the dorsal part suggest that the carcasses were carried from a distance to locate and bury them at a preferred location (see Figure 6).
This abnormal recumbency is due to a combination of three factors. First, preexisting ’tight’ trenches in tea gardens to easily bury carcasses. Second, elephants have become bolder and use human spaces to fulfil their behavioural and dietary needs. People’s tolerance towards elephants in north Bengal is more than in other parts of West Bengal and other Indian states (Roy et al. 2022) – presenting a healthy coexistence scenario. Third, the absence of trenches and the presence of carnivores inside the forests projects a problematic situation for the elephants to choose. Historically elephants must have buried their deceased offspring inside forests subject to trench availability, loose soil, among other environmental factors, but we also suggest that these megaherbivores adapt to the changing socio-ecological scenario and landscapes.
Such sentient behaviour in a high human density region strengthens the morale of coexistence between humans and nonhumans. Thus, their conservation quotient increases through ethics, more than elephants’ ecological role, and boosts their socio-ecological rank in society. Such exalted status of elephants is further complemented through religious reverence among various communities worldwide, including India. Births and deaths are memorialized among the local communities and hold a special place in their rural culture, as was done in the case of Devpara TG. Cases 2, 3, and 4 didn’t display any such homage due to the isolated location of the carcass and religious heterogeneity in the neighbourhood.
Based on anecdotal evidence from TG managers and workers, the herd made loud vocalizations and left quickly – approximately 30-40 minutes. This behaviour suggests that elephants distinguish human and nonhuman spaces and avoids dissension with humans.
Vocalization remains an expected behaviour among Asian and African elephants, which was limited to the burial phase. In these cases, loud trumpets signified mourning and preparing for inter-specific aggression (Sharma et al. 2019). A second-hand account (formal interview with the forest range officer) showed a similar case inside Jaldapara national park (an adjoining forest in the same landscape). The elephant herd stayed there for more than four hours near the burial site, most probably because it was undisturbed by humans. His other observation adds that the same herd visited the burial site multiple times to investigate various stages of decay. This observation aligns parallel to the behaviour among African elephants (Douglas-hamilton et al., 2006; Goldenberg & Wittemyer, 2019).
Besides these behaviours, we also observed the efforts of various herd members through their footprints in levelling the soil above the carcass – supporting the social-bonds hypothesis. Moreover, from the size of the footsteps and dung boli, we also infer that carcass burying was a combined effort from allomothers and herd members of different age groups. Such indirect signs have been recorded in India (Sharma et al. 2019) and Africa (Goldenberg and Wittemyer 2019), even though those observations were only limited to mourning and gathering. Also, the herds operated in small numbers, parallel to previous studies on Asian elephants (Pokharel and Sharma 2022) but contrary to African elephants (Silva et al. 2017). Thus, due to the absence of a hierarchical structure among Asian elephants, we report commensurated efforts in the burial of the deceased conspecifics by the surviving herd members, unlike African elephants, where the agency works in hierarchical order (Sharma et al. 2019).
Postmortem behaviour:
Following the wildlife protocol, the forest department removed the mounted carcasses and kept the records for research and training. Thus, a further comparison concerning ’visiting the carcass’ cannot be made between Asian and African elephants. In natural setting, elephants have been reported to visit the burial site at various stages of decomposition both in Africa (Hawley et al. 2016; Goldenberg and Wittemyer 2019; Rutherford and Murray 2020) and Asia (Pokharel and Sharma 2022). This case study shows the opposite behaviour altogether. In all the examples, the herd fled the site within forty minutes of burial. A formal interview with the tea garden manager shows that the elephants now use a parallel pathway and completely avoid their previous ’active’ route. This observation was complemented by indirect evidence of dung boli and footsteps that the elephant herds use the parallel pathways more often than before. This behaviour comes up as a new contrasting behaviour to their African cousins who spend a lot of time investigating and exploring the elephant remains (Douglas-hamilton et al., 2006). Concludingly, burial location plays a central role in determining the postmortem behaviour among elephants, whether inside or outside the PAs.
All observations were opportunistic and must not be generalized for the entire study area or other regions of similar biogeographic and environmental conditions. We report only the cases outside PAs and the behaviour thereafter. The behaviour of the elephant herd inside PAs could be similar to their African cousins, or not. In all cases, all elephant herds avoid burial sites and take parallel routes. For the surviving elephants, these sites are seen as ’bad milestones’ or ’bad omens’.
Any of the deceased calves didn’t age more than twelve months and similar to studies on captive elephants, wild Asian elephants also remain susceptible to death in early years (Mar et al. 2012). All the death cases happened due to prevailing illness or natural unfavourable circumstances. Still, we restrained from putting forward the exact reason that claimed the deaths of these calves. However, we claim it concretely that irrespective of the cause of death, the elephant herd attempts to bury the carcass in an abnormal recumbency position inside TGs. Even though the nutritional status of all the calf carcasses was poor and poor-to-normal, we also step back in categorizing the deaths into natural or accidental, except in case 2, where the elephant calf died of multiple organ failure due to acute microbial infection. Cases 1, 3, and 4 suggest deaths due to cardio-respiratory failure, which could have arisen for numerous reasons, including falling into the trench, being stampeded, or suffocating to death naturally. Thus, we refrain from stating that all the deaths happened outside TGs. At the same time, we also report that all the trenches where the carcasses were mounted were too shallow (approximately 0.60 to 0.70 m) and least probable for calves to slip and die. We also eliminate any possibility of infanticide in any of the cases as reported in other cognitive species, such as Chacma baboons (Carter et al. 2020) and Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei ) (Watts 2019). This remains an open platform for future research among academics researching elephant behaviour and thanatology. Subsequently, we repress from commenting on whether these death cases would trigger regional HEC.
Even though the two distinct cousins separated c. 9-4.2 Mya (Palkopoulou et al. 2018), the ancestral traits still connect the two species. We hope scholars studying thanatology come up with detailed anecdotes across various species and perform nuanced comparative thanatological studies to connect the phylogenetic continuity. We encourage science and social science evidence-based thanatological studies for not just sentient beings but also non-sentient beings and less-loved species in a changing natural and socio-political environment.