Wild Elephants gather inexplicably, mourn death of “Elephant Whisperer”

reply to post by TruthxIsxInxThexMist


No I would not be suprised at all at how well elephants can hear, I was born in Africa and have lived in Africa for over fifty years! I have been closer to wild elephants than you could probably dream to be and not in the "animal park" or zoo context, but in the wild, not just for pleasure/to take a couple of photos but when I was in the military, when we were in the bush sleeping in tents with wild animals roaming free around us!

What I don't get about your posts is that you cynics will grasp at any straw no matter how small and try to deny that these animals have an instinct that we don't understand.

You can keep denying and quoting sources but I believe what I believe and I believe that these animals "felt" the death of someone that they were very close to and instinctively gathered in the area where his body was!

Basically what you are sayng is that someone, his son or someone connected to him, used a recording of his voice to "call" the elephants! To me that sounds much more farfetched, and reaching/stretching to "prove" that they did not do this out of instinct.

Don't you think that makes his son, or whoever did this, sound quite shallow and uncaring, do you really think that someone who is mourning the death of his father would go to such extremes and if you do what would the reason be for taking such action? In the hope that someone somewhere might start a thread on it on the internet, hoping that the thread would be read by millions and generate publicity/funding/sympathy or something? You are the one questioning the validity of this thread, so PROVE that it is not true!

Elephants are known to have graveyards and they continue to return to them to "mourn" their dead much as humans do!

Animals have been known to cross countries, which they have no prior knowledge of, to rejoin their human owners if they have been left behind when a family moves! How does that happen? BIG SPEAKERS???



Did you consider that elephant herds can travel up to 50 miles a day? So by my reckoning they could have been anything from 12 up to 100 miles away! They can hear each other from a distance of up to, maybe a bit more than, 5 miles! This just doesn't calculate, why would they take 2 days to travel 5 or even 10 miles? "REALLY REALLY BIG SPEAKERS"

Originally posted by xXxinfidelxXx
I'd say that we are the ones who really don't seem to fit in anywhere on the evolutionary chain. Every species on this earth operates within it's ecosystem, having their own equilibrium and natural population control, except for us, that is. We move from one area to the next, devouring all resources as we go.

I would suggest reading less misanthropic literature and more scientific literature.

reply to post by wiser3


I have to go out but i may be back in the thread later with a more composed response!!

But

Maybe not the whole herd were bunched together at first... they could well have been spread out over 20, 50 or 100 miles round.... you could have say 5 Elephants in a group and another 5 Elephants 5 or 6 miles away and they call eachother using their call and supersonic hearing etc.... this Method of 5 spread out over 50 miles lets say would generate the whole herd coming together before travelling to the destination of the sound on the loudspeaker!!

LOL

It could have happened like this, there is no denying it but yes even i would like to believe that the Elephants did this by themselves....

I starred your post btw as i like the fact that you have lived in the wild with these Animals!! Must be great to be able to do that for a long time.... I always wanted to do a Safari but havn't got round to it as yet.

reply to post by TruthxIsxInxThexMist


I appreciate your reply and thanks for the star! Not necessary!

I understand your point but a herd of elephants in the wild are really not going to split up over such a huge area!

They are like close knit families, they stay together, even when browsing / grazing they are seldom more than 50 metres from their "neighbour. Typical herds are 9 to 11 cows with offspring, the males will usually go "solo" or form smaller groups of "Bull herds"!
When a herd becomes to large they will split into familial herds but these herds will then also remain close to each other!

I don't mean to get angry or abusive but I just wish more people would open their minds to the "possibility" that they do communicate on a level we don't understand and that they form bonds with humans who have looked after/cared for them and somehow they "know" when something has happened to the person that they came to accept as a family member!

Elephants are very, for the want of a better word, "emotional" and if one of the herd goes down due to sickness, being shot or old age or even dies the other will gather round and try to lift the fallen one to it's feet desperate not to leave a single family member behind! This as I am sure you can imagine is a very sad thing to see happen, absolutely heart wrenching!

reply to post by esteay812


I am delighted to see that your mind is opening to the communication that goes on between humans and animals....what disturbs me is that you didn't realize these things before..

not that I'm chastising you, not at all. It's just tragic that children are not aware of this very real and very two-way communication that DOES happen between animals and humans who live together, whether just on the same block, or in the same bed at night. I have had pets ALL OF MY LIFE....and from time to time MANY of them....
I called it a petting zoo....horses, mules, chickens, hamsters, a rat, parakeets, dogs and cats (always multiple), and a few people, all mixed in together. One of the chickens used to "roost" on the back of our Shire mare. The mare (a draft horse with a head larger than my entire torso) would often wander around in the paddock with that chicken on her back.

I very unfortunately, due to the greed and idiocy of a human with whom I no longer have anything to do ("despise" is the word that comes to mind), had to give up that place, and those friends of mine.

I think it is very important for children to live with animals from the very start. It's not that mystifying or hard to understand. We use our tongues and vocal chords, as well as our bodies, to communicate.

Anyone who thinks animals can't figure out what we mean is completely ignorant. Animals learn what words mean (sometimes at our house we have to spell words out - like chewy and feed-the-dogs), just like we learn what a certain meow means, or a "berf-berf" or a play-bow...a tipped head or ear movement...

This story of Mr Anthony is wonderful. If only ALL humans realized the beauty of living WITH nature, rather than raping, pillaging, spoiling, defiling, destroying, and taking advantage of it. It really, really makes me SICK.

In fact, I had to wait until today to watch the video in the OP, because I knew it would upset me and I needed to brace myself. I, for one, prefer animals over humans anyway....I am able to read the daily homicide stories with no emotion whatsoever most of the time....but I see one of those ads for Humane Society help, all those sad and captive animals, and I WEEP.

Humans are the bane of this planet. I'm embarrassed when I see the destruction, stupidity, arrogance, and insensitive monstrosities that the human population renders EVERY DAY.
Uggh..
Yeah, I'm a misanthrope. Quiet at home with my animals, and perfectly content not to have any other person around me at all. I'd much rather sweep up dog hair and have to get up to let everybody in or out of the house than clean up after some slob who is oblivious to their surroundings and to the feelings of the others with whom they live.

Sorry for the "rant" tone....
I'm sure your paper will be great....and I hope that as you grow older you explore just how easy it is to have your dog know what you want, what you are saying, and you are also able to learn to read his signals.....if you have children of your own, you will make a point to teach them from the get-go, from the day they are born, how to co-exist with animals, care for them, nurture and communicate with them, and love them.

It is a critical life skill, and one day your very survival may depend on it while your credit score and driver's license are completely useless.
Cheers....

Wow.

All I have to say is that when it comes to reality, we don't know the half of it.
Think of everything we have discovered already...now think of all the things we have yet to discover.

The movie Avatar -- what if something like that is possible? an interconnected web of all living things. our thoughts and feelings felt by all within this web.
Great story.

reply to post by imherejusttoread


You place too much faith in the scientific community.

reply to post by wildtimes


hmm... who says I didn't notice these types of communications before? I may have not acknowledged it here in such a manner before. However, I have long believed that forms of communication are used within species, as well as spanning across several different species.

I may have not considered, in depth, the possibility that many species of life may have a much sharper evolution of emotional understanding than humans or that they may be capable of comminication with beings of different species. I have always questioned the possibility of animals having forms of communication that are not recognized by our current scientific viewpoint.

I am certain that I am not alone when saying; As a kid I would ask my brother if he thought animals speak in a language, like humans using Englsih, but we simply can't comprehend. I am certain most everyone here has contemplated that idea at one point or another throughout their childhood.

The thoughts like that are the ones which led me to form an opinion linking Love as a common emotion shared by all creatures, giving a way to decipher different levels of communication from our planet's life-chain

I do agree with you, having interaction with wildlife - domestic or otherwise - is crucial for a child's emotional and critical thought development. It does worry me a bit that the children today spend the majority of their waking life in school or on video games, computers, cell phones etc.

I believe this generation is actually retarding themselves to a level of sub-standard idiocy not seen spanning an entire generation of human development in an incredibly long time.

I am sure other areas are developing at a much higher level, but that development is occurring in regards to our technological and scientific evolution - not a bad thing by any means, but could be devastating to a child's social interaction skill development. Maybe not, but it seems plausible such a decline would occur, due to the lack of physical interaction between other humans, as-well-as wildlife and nature.

We may carry an inate instinct that allows us to interact with wildlife on a subconscious level, allowing our minds to calculate the meaning of the body language and voice inflection present during a confrontation with an animal.

This instinctual program built into our minds would probably need stimulation from an individual's surrounding habitat, in order to develop the level of inter-species communication needed to quickly process information received from animals native to the region, affording us the ability to assess the risk and determine the need to deploy our fight or flight mechanism - or to understand the safety of the situation and how to maintain a safe environment during the confrontation with wild life.

Sorry for the rant, it's late here and my ears are smoking

reply to post by esteay812


Again, was congratulating you...I guess it was the way you described your mom's ability with your dog, that made it seem like you hadn't considered it before.

I apologize if that's the intention you gathered. I see we are on the same page...
and your post did not read as a "rant." I agree with you completely. Very interesting thoughts, and well put.

Cheers.

reply to post by wildtimes


Thans for the nice words and your thoughts around the subject. Hopefully those of us who remember what it is like to go outside and see wildilfe in it's 'native' habitat can urge the younger generation into stepping outside more often than they are becoming accustomed to.

It may be something different for those who have just entered adult/parenthood, than what they were taught by watching how their parents and role models behaved during their childhood.

Today's parents and gaurdians need to identify the fact that the responsibilities of a modern parent are from an entirely different Universe compared to the standard parenting practices from generations past.

I am sure there will be a learning curve for many parents and, unfortunately, there will be some casualties of poor parenting - resulting from ignorance identifying proper parenting standards for today's techonologically immersed youth.

If today's parents acknowledge their need for change in traditional parenting practices, they have taken the first steps to producing well balanced kids who have a well nourished intellect and environmental awareness that other children may lack, due to current technology available in the average, middle-class home. The inability to properly regulate an acceptable amount of interaction, between the natural environment and their technological toys, could result in an entire generation being socially crippled, when compared to socially excepted standards, established over the past decades.

Thanks again for not taking my last reply as offencive. I didn't realize how confrontational it may have read, when I first posted it. Since re-reading it, I see how I could have easily been construed as beng defencive and offencive at the same time. That wasn't my intent, just the product of exhaustion I suppose. I did post what I meant, but I see where I could have easily worded it differently, to be less 'aggressive'.

this is amazing, animal could been more humane than a person ..

reply to post by esteay812

No worries. You are absolutely right. I made it a point to make sure my kids grew up very much aware of the outdoors...my parents did the same for me, and when I was working in the urban core with "at risk" youths as their facilitator for a group, I was amazed at how many of them had never been out of the city.

One of them said to another on our way to a climbing tower, "Open the window so I can throw this can out."

I said, "no!" They couldn't even fathom the concept of not littering. And so worried that their white shoes might get scuffed, or their pant-creases mussed, or a bug might land on them.

Reminds me of when my son was about two years old, he and a little guy his age that was my daycare client were triking around on the patio, and the other kid stopped and looked at the patio and shrieked like he'd seen hell itself. My son wrinkled his brow, triked over to where the frightened little boy was paralyzed with fear, peered at it, and shoved his pacifier into his cheek to announce calmly, "It's a ant," and pedaled off.

Some of my best memories are going fishing with them, and hiking in the mountains, and snorkeling in the Bahamas, etc. I've always been a huge fan of national parks. We are lucky to have a gorgeous park very close by, right on the edge of the city, with heavy forests in a hilly terrain surrounding a gorgeous lake.

Thanks for your response, and I'm glad to see people like yourself giving these ideas "press".

Hummingbird hovering outside my window right now!!

There are many mysteries in the world and this is one of them.

reply to post by wildtimes

One kid said to another, on our way to a climbing tower, "Open the window so I can throw this can out."…

"They couldn't even fathom the concept of not littering"…

Ha-ha, I certainly believe that! No doubt their common sense is influenced by their parents and other ideas instilled in them from the MSM machine - critical thinking at it’s worst… if it isn’t bad enough, stayed tuned, it is destined to get more pathetic.

"shrieked like he'd seen hell itself." ‘the frightened little boy was paralyzed with fear‘ ‘shoved his pacifier into his cheek to announce calmly, "It's a ant,“ ’

That’s funny as heck too! There is a fine line between comical and seriously troubling. This display of atrophied intelligence is teetering on disturbing, troubling, and flat out scary, especially when it’s realized that rock bottom hasn’t been hit yet!

‘I'm glad to see people like yourself giving these ideas "press".’

Thank you for the compliment! I seriously just try to post what I have developed ideas or opinions about - like most here. Sometimes they are very plausible and other times they make me look like a bona-fide socio-basket-nutter-path-butter-case

reply to post by madforit96


hi madforit96!

I definitely agree with you. The coolest things about many of the mysteries that inundate our world everyday is that a lot of them do not need fancy equipment, massive amounts of currency, a college doctorate, agreement from peers, or permission from others to research, form hypothesis, then perform experiments or develop complex mathematical sequences accounting for the theory.

Each and every single one of us can identify a mystery and develop a very plausible explanation that asnwers the questions relative to the mystery itself.

Thinking outside the box and presenting unorthodox ideas could lead to a break-through on a much larger scale than originally anticipated. The right line of thought and ambition could very well lead to technological advancements and discoveries that had previously never even been considered or imagined. Such as electricity, microwaves, etc, etc. Things that are undetectable by current technology of the times.

Many mysteries remain unimaginable, undetectable, and unexplainable by today's technological standards. It is possible we will identify these mysteries and harness their benefites eventually, but it is also possible that a greater understanding of mysteries will remain alien to us and our technology to the point of human extinction.

I wish we had a direct link to a real life Akashic Plain that we could use to obtain answers to the remaining major mysteries of the Universe.

Maybe one day we wiil and it may also be much, much sooner than you or I may currently imagine. It could come via a true 'technological singularity'

In fact, it is indeed quite possible that a technological singularity has already been produced under extremely gaurded and monitored conditions of a government laboratory.

I have a good hunch that just such an event has been administered and is currently being monitored and studied at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratories)

I have this hunch, because ORNL introduced the 'Kraken' to the public a while back. In technological standards, it has since been rendered obsolete, which is why I believe they updated the Kraken. The may have possibly reworked the entire structure of the kraken, employing new designs, adding insane levels of computing power, even installing incredibly advanced technology, the likes never seen or discussed in the public technology sector.

I'd like to keep typing, but this reply has already exceeded any acceptable length, where the average attention span is concerned.

reply or U2U me (message) if you'd like to talk more about the kraken or technological singularity and it's impact on our current society and regional civilizations.


(hey, at least my lenghty post wasn't written as one massive wall of words appearing as a giant block of
jumbled letters,

a.k.a.: 'The Great Wall of ATS Text')

Wow. This is something I wish I could have seen. We know many animals (elephants are only among those at the top of our list only because their communications have been studied to a far greater degree and are far more intelligent then we ever imagined.) What we can learn from them if our human selflessness can only give them the chance to teach us, is unimaginable.

Any one out there want to talk to aliens? Then get some practice. Talk with the manny living species all around us. What they have to say may well save our, and their, ass.

Originally posted by emptyOmind
this reminds me of something my aunt told me she read. she said that there are only two animals that mourn the death of their own beside humans, mice and elephants.

I personally think most animals do.

a few examples there are many many out there.

There was a story about a crow that was seen to bring food each day to its mate who had a broken wing, he continued to feed her before himself.

There was a duck killed by a hunter, it's mate...they mate for life as do crows, continued to come back, leaving the flock and circling crying out until he to was shot.

My sons dog died, his other dog clearly grieved not eating and not playing.

reply to post by onehuman


Wow I am amazed. Animals seem to just know. If you pay attention to animals you can see that they know more than they let on.

Amazing this brought a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat ... thank God(dess) for men and women like this who put the meaning of life on our planet into perspective ... I really hope the elephants find another human to share love and trust with.

Woody

reply to post by onehuman


I feel it is time we stop being surprised by animals demonstrating that they are emotional and intelligent beings imbued with consciousness/Soul and the spark of Source/Spirit.