The astonishing proof that elephants grieve as deeply as we do, revealed by scientists after an extraordinary action by a mourning herd is seen for the first time…

For Clint Eastwood, the bull elephant Abu was a natural in front of the cameras, a born professional. The Hollywood star turned director called him ‘one-take Abu’.

The giant tusker was rescued from a Texas wildlife park and given a new life in Botswana’s Okavango Delta and appeared in Eastwood’s critically acclaimed 1990 film White Hunter Black Heart, plus a series of films and TV shows, as well as an IBM advertisement.

But for a three-year-old orphan elephant named Mafunyane, Abu played a different role. He was a father figure to the youngster, following him everywhere and copying what he did.

When Abu died in 2002, Mafunyane was sad. For days he stood guard over the body and kept hyenas at bay. Other elephants came to pay their respects to Abu – one, an older female named Cathy, stood with the temporal glands on the sides of her head flowing fluid. Just as humans cry tears, this is the elephant’s way of showing intense emotions.

Even now, twenty years later, Mafunyane always pauses when he passes the entrance to Seba Camp at the safari center where Abu’s skull is on display. The Rangers there have no doubt that he recognizes the remains of his friend and mentor.

It may seem fanciful to suggest that elephants mourn deceased loved ones, but a wealth of evidence is emerging that they and other animals – including primates and whales – feel loss as strongly as humans. And just like us, they use rituals to process their grief.

Forest rangers and tea workers in northern India have long claimed that elephants there bury their dead in legendary elephant graveyards.

Now a team from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune has published findings that appear to confirm these stories.

In an irrigation ditch on a tea plantation in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, the body of a one-year-old calf was discovered in 2022, upside down and almost completely buried.

This may have been the result of an accident, but in the past year and a half another four dead elephant calves have been found buried in ditches. They all had marks on their skin that indicated they had been carried away some distance after death.

Report authors Parveen Kaswan and Dr. Akashdeep Roy said they believe this indicates an intentional burial, although they emphasize that the behavior has not been observed firsthand.

All the young elephants were dead before they were placed in their graves.

It is possible, but unlikely, the scientists say, that the ditches then collapsed under the weight of the herd around them.

But elephants in Africa have been observed covering their dead with branches and leaves, in what is known as a ‘weak burial’.

Veteran wildlife filmmaker James Honeyborne said: ‘We may never know exactly what goes on in an elephant’s mind, but it would be arrogant to assume that we are the only species that can feel loss and grief.’

In 2013 he produced Sir David Attenborough’s Africa series, which caused a sensation with a scene of a mother and her starving calf during a drought. Cameraman Mark Deeble followed the pair for days. Even after the calf died, the distraught female continued to try to pick it up and move it with her feet.

Finally she seemed to understand that there was nothing more she could do. But instead of running away in search of the food she so desperately needed, she simply stood by the body for a long time, as if paying respects.

Elephant bonds can be equal in intensity to anything known in the human world, and breaking these bonds can be fatal.

Dame Daphne Sheldrick runs a sanctuary in Kenya where baby elephants orphaned by poachers are hand-reared and released back into the wild. One of her first cases was brought in when she was just a few days old. Lady Daphne devoted herself to the calf, barely leaving its side during its first six months and feeding it gallons of human milk (elephant calves cannot digest cow’s milk).

But she ended up having to relinquish control to another caregiver for a week to attend her daughter’s wedding. When she returned, she was devastated to discover that the baby had died. It had longed for her before it collapsed, dead of a broken heart.

“I made the mistake of thinking that another human being could take my place,” Dame Daphne said.

‘To avoid becoming too attached to any one individual, all Sheldrick Trust carers take turns sleeping next to each elephant in the nursery.’

It’s not just elephants that experience such emotions.

At a funeral in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka in 2022, grieving relatives were moved to see a gray langur monkey sitting near the coffin. He grabbed the dead man’s arm, lifted his hand and dropped it. Then it leaned forward and brushed his cheek, as if to give him a kiss of mourning and farewell.

The man’s name was Peethambaram Rajan, a mild-mannered 56-year-old known for his kindness to animals, and this monkey was a favorite of his.

Monkeys react to death in a very human way. A 2021 study for the Royal Society, which looked at more than 400 reported cases involving 50 species of primates, found that female monkeys and apes will mourn dead babies for days, cradling the corpse and carrying it everywhere.

The society of chimpanzees is so complex that researchers are constantly reporting new behavior. A group in Guinea built a cairn at the base of a tree. “We may have found the first evidence that chimpanzees created a kind of sanctuary,” says PhD student Laura Kehoe from Berlin.

Much of the best evidence comes from nature documentaries.

In 2019, filmmaker John Downer and his team built one of their signature ‘spy creatures’: a robotic baby langur with a camera in one eyeball for their Spy In The Wild series. The mechanical monkey was left in a temple in Rajasthan, India, where it was found by a group of langurs. One of the young females picked it up to play with it – and then dropped it from a height.

As the doll lay motionless, the adults gathered around her. It was clear they thought the ‘baby’ was dead. Gradually they began to embrace and comfort each other, like mourners at a funeral. Parents reached out to their children and folded them in their arms.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of their “humanity” comes from a gorilla named Koko, who lived in captivity in California for over forty years with researcher Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson.

Koko learned American Sign Language, with a vocabulary of 1,000 words or more, and was able to have conversations with Dr. Patterson. In 1985 Koko got a kitten, a gray Manx who she named All Ball. She adored it, cuddled it and cared for it constantly.

When All Ball was run over and killed, Koko had been robbed.

She reacted with horror when Dr. Patterson broke the news and wailed a long, drawn-out moan that was a gorilla’s sob. She repeatedly drew the words ‘sad’, ‘bad’ and ‘frown’.

Later, Dr. Patterson asked Koko if she knew what death meant. The gorilla replied, “Trouble old man… comfortable hole, bye… sleep.”

That strongly implies that the idea of ​​a physical burial is instinctive, hardwired into primate brains.

Dame Daphne, who was widowed almost 50 years ago, says she learned how to cope with grief from animals.

She draws strength from the courage of her elephants “and how they can turn a page, cry, grieve and grieve, and then focus on the living.” That is a lesson for every human heart.