I have a fascination for elephants. I hold them to be one of the most intelligent species on earth even though they are so often portrayed as awkward and ridiculous. These creature are not just magnificently built, their way of life is an astonishing departure from what we imagine it to be.

My first encounter with an elephant was at the age of 3 or 4, at the Zoo de Vincennes in Paris. I was feeding the largest male a peanut. For a couple of seconds, my hand and part of my forearm disappeared inside the huge trunk as if in a huge warm hand, to my immense delight. I fell in love with elephantkind then and there. Every time I saw an elephant after that, whether in a zoo or Marine World or in the wild, feeding off the trees of the South African savannah, I always felt the respect owed to an elder wise friend.

Elephants are huge, slow and heavy. So heavy in fact that they can only sleep 2 hours and a half a night, for to lie down for a longer period of time would cause great damage to their inner organs. They are the only animal species that cannot jump at all. This sheer mass is an efficient protection against the fierce predators of Africa or Asia. They live, in consequence, relatively peaceful lives that may be what allowed them to develop their complex personalities.

Far from being slow to think and act, elephants have proven time and again that they were capable of dealing with dramatic situations intelligently and efficiently -- and save lives. I have here an article I cut out from a magazine a few years back. The story was that of a female that gave birth, after a difficult labor, to a stillborn cub. As the photographer stared in horror, the mother began to kick the lifeless body, over and over again. For three hours she persevered, until the impossible happened: the cub, his system stimulated by this rough massage, stirred. Slowly he rose to his feet with his mother's help, and they both rejoined the rest of the herd.

An elephant herd is matriarchal, composed solely of females and cubs under the leadership of the oldest female. With the males out of the way, a flawless family life has taken shape. When a female gives birth, other females that are currently milking help her with her cub. These "aunts" watch over the baby's sleep, allowing the mother to rest after her labor; they also walk beside it to protect it from the sun, as its muscles are too weak for it to evacuate heat by flapping its ears, and it faces the risk of sunstroke. If the cub gets into trouble, the aunts run to the rescue. The same young elephant who was forcefully brought back to life got too close to the water when it followed its mother to the waterhole and toppled in, disappearing in the silt. The mother and aunt rushed to pull him out, pushing and pulling with trunk and legs: the most impressive part is that they made sure to hold its head out of the water the whole time.

More importantly, aunts act like human godmothers, adopting the cub should its mother die. After what can only be a mourning ritual (the herd members gather around the body and caress it with their trunks for a while then move on), one of the aunts firmly leads the cub away from his dead mother and takes him in with her own.

It is no big surprise to learn that elephants have one of the lowest rates of infant mortality in the entire animal kingdom -- no more than thirty percent.

Instinct? Not really. It has been observed that elephants, like human babies, know very little by instinct when they are born. They have to painstakingly learn everything they need to survive. They don't even know how to use their trunk to drink! Baby elephants suckle with their mouths, like all other mammals: it is only by mimicking the adults and after a lot of practice that they succeed in filling their noses with water without choking, then insert it into their mouths -- or splash it down their backs for a refreshing shower. An adult can hold 7 liters of water in his or her trunk, and will drink as much as 200 liters at a time. Cubs also need to learn what plants are edible, and they do so by sniffing the mouths of the adults and memorizing the smells of what they have eaten. This apprenticeship can take up to 4 months. Grabbing a piece of wood in order to scratch their bodies is not only something they have to learn, it is a very rare occurrence in the animal kingdom -- the concept of a tool.

As a whole, learned knowledge takes a far greater place in the elephant species than innate or instinctive knowledge. In other words, almost nothing that they do happens without them thinking about it and making conscious decisions. A herd teaches the newborn everything it knows, starting with their complex language, and in its turn the cub will enrich the herd's knowledge bank by its own experiences. Some herds may have not figured out the back-scratching thing yet (though I doubt it), and who knows, some may be able to tell hunters form photographers by now.

I believe there is a great deal to learn about the elephant mind. They definitely have a place besides dolphins, whales and apes in the research for non-human minds that we could communicate with.

. Articles cut out from Le Figaro Magazine and notes gathered during safaris and misc.

Article © Joumana Medlej