The roads elephants made: A journey through Addo and memory - Daily Maverick

Amara: Welcome to The Long Memory — I'm Amara, elephant biologist, science communicator, and someone who has spent more mornings than I can count watching elephants move through the African bush and thinking: there is so much going on in there. Today we have got a rich episode — we're heading to South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park to talk about the literal paths elephants carve into the landscape and into time itself, we're celebrating some new life at a zoo herd in Kansas, and we're sitting with some harder questions about what it means to share a world with these animals when space runs short. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense for their teams; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — offering silicon development consulting all the way from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio across the silicon industry. These are companies building the future, and we're grateful they help us tell these stories. Alright — let's go deep. Amara: So let's start with the mind. Because I think the thing that draws most people to elephants — beyond their sheer size, beyond the way a baby elephant wobbles on its feet and makes you laugh — is the sense that there is a real inner life happening. That these animals are not just moving through the world. They are reading it, mapping it, remembering it. Amara: And there is no better place to see that made physical than Addo Elephant National Park, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. When you walk or drive through Addo, you notice these paths. These worn, deliberate corridors through the thicket, smooth-sided, pressed into the earth over decades. And here's the thing — those roads were not made by people. They were made by elephants. Generation after generation, following the same routes to water, to shade, to minerals. The landscape of Addo is, in a very real sense, a map of elephant memory. Amara: That's not a metaphor. Researchers studying elephant movement have documented how herds return to the same locations year after year, often led by older matriarchs who hold what scientists call a "mental map" of their home range. And these ranges are enormous — African savanna elephants can roam over thousands of square kilometers. Yet they navigate them with extraordinary precision. They know where the water is. They know where it will be in the dry season versus the wet season. They know which routes are safe. Amara: Karen McComb and her colleagues at the University of Sussex have done some of the most compelling work on this. They've shown that the size and quality of a matriarch's memory correlates directly with how well her herd survives — particularly in times of drought. The oldest females, the ones who have lived through the most dry seasons, carry knowledge that younger elephants simply don't have yet. And the herd trusts that. When a matriarch turns and walks with purpose, the others follow. There is something almost breathtaking about that — the idea that an elephant in her fifties or sixties is walking a route she first walked as a juvenile, and that that memory is keeping her grandchildren alive. Amara: At Addo, the park was established in 1931, initially to protect the last few elephants remaining in the Eastern Cape — there were as few as eleven animals at one point, which is almost hard to believe. Now the population has grown to several hundred. And those elephants are still using paths, still tracing routes through the terrain. Some researchers believe the older individuals in the park may still carry memory traces — behavioral echoes — of landscapes that existed before the fences went up. Whether they remember, or whether they have re-learned, is a fascinating open question. But the roads remain. The land holds the shape of elephant thought. Amara: And that's what I find so moving about the cognitive science here — it's not abstract. Elephant memory has texture. It has weight. It is pressed into the ground beneath your feet. Amara: Now — from the mind, to the heart. Because with elephants, you cannot talk about one without the other for very long. Amara: There's news this week from the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, and it's genuinely joyful. One of their female African elephants is pregnant again. The herd at Sedgwick County has been growing steadily, and that matters — not just for the zoo, but for what it tells us about the emotional and social conditions that allow elephants to thrive enough to reproduce. Because elephants don't just need food and shelter to breed. They need — and I mean this in the most scientifically grounded way possible — they need each other. Amara: Elephant reproduction is deeply social. In the wild, when a female gives birth, it is rarely a private affair. The herd gathers. Other females — aunties, older sisters, the matriarch — position themselves around the mother. They rumble. They touch her with their trunks. And when the calf arrives, the celebration is unmistakable. There is trumpeting, there is spinning, there is this extraordinary collective excitement that researchers have documented and described in detail. Joyce Poole, one of the foremost authorities on elephant behavior and communication, has described these birth celebrations as among the most emotionally intense events in elephant social life. Amara: And then the alloparenting begins — the shared raising of the young. Older calves will help tend to younger ones. Females without calves of their own will babysit, will comfort, will teach. The herd is the mother, in a very real sense. A calf doesn't just bond to the female who gave birth to it — it bonds to the whole social fabric of the group. Amara: This is why the growth of a zoo herd, when it's managed thoughtfully, is worth paying attention to. It tells you something. It tells you the animals feel safe enough, bonded enough, secure enough to bring new life into the world. That is not a small thing. I'm not naive — I know zoo life is complicated and that these animals deserve the largest, richest environments we can provide them. But a pregnant elephant in a stable, growing herd group is a sign that something in that social world is functioning. And the calf that comes will be born into relationship, into memory, into a web of care that is, at its core, what elephant society is built on. Amara: The science on elephant grief is equally powerful, and it mirrors this in a painful way. Cynthia Moss, who spent decades studying the elephants of Amboseli, documented how elephants respond to the death of a herd member — standing over the body, touching the bones with their trunks, returning to the site months or even years later. They seem to recognize the remains of individuals they knew. They are not just responding to death in general. They are responding to this death. This specific loss. That level of particularized grief implies a level of particularized attachment that should, I think, change the way we think about what these animals are. Amara: Joy and grief. They are two sides of the same depth. And elephants feel both. Amara: Now for our third thread — elephants and people. And today, I want to be honest with you: this one is complicated. Because this week's news asks us to hold some genuinely difficult things at the same time. Amara: Let me start with India, because there's a lot happening there that deserves attention. India is home to around sixty percent of the world's wild Asian elephants — roughly thirty thousand animals. And the Indian government's conservation work, while imperfect, is substantial. They've been working to identify, protect, and restore elephant corridors — those narrow strips of habitat that connect larger forest patches and allow elephant populations to move, to interbreed, to stay genetically healthy. There are over a hundred identified corridors in India, and efforts to secure them legally and physically are ongoing. Amara: This matters enormously because the biggest threat to Asian elephants isn't just poaching — it's fragmentation. When a population can't move, can't connect with other groups, it begins to decline. Corridors are, quite literally, lifelines. And maintaining them requires negotiating with farmers, with local communities, with road and railway authorities. It is painstaking, politically difficult work, and when it succeeds, it's worth celebrating. Amara: But then you look at Namibia, and you see how razor-thin the margin is. There's a conflict unfolding there — in the elephant corridors of the northwest — between expanding human communities and desert-adapted elephant populations. These are remarkable animals, by the way. Desert elephants in Namibia have learned to travel extraordinary distances between water sources, to dig for water in dry riverbeds, to survive in conditions that would challenge their savanna cousins. But they are running out of room. As human settlements expand and cattle ranching intensifies, the elephants are increasingly pushed into direct conflict — raiding crops, sometimes killing people, being killed in retaliation. It is a situation where everyone involved is trying to survive. And there are no easy answers. Amara: What the research consistently shows is that when local communities are genuine partners in conservation — when they have economic stake in the elephants living, when they have real decision-making power — outcomes improve. For elephants and for people. But that requires resources, political will, and a kind of humility from international conservation bodies that isn't always present. The communities living alongside elephants in Namibia are not the problem. They are essential to the solution. Amara: And then there's a story from Malaysia that I want to mention, because it raises questions I think are worth sitting with. Three Borneo pygmy elephants — one of the most critically endangered elephant subspecies on earth — were transferred from Malaysia to a zoo in Japan. Activists are demanding a probe. They want to know whether proper permits were obtained, whether the animals' welfare was adequately considered, whether this transfer serves conservation in any meaningful way or simply satisfies demand for exotic animals in captivity far from home. Amara: Borneo pygmy elephants number only around a thousand individuals in the wild. Every animal matters. And the question of whether removing elephants from their range country for display purposes is ever justified — conservation benefit, educational mission, animal welfare — is one the field is genuinely wrestling with. I don't think this is a story with a clean moral. But I do think those activists are asking the right questions, and I hope the answers are forthcoming and honest. Amara: What all three of these stories share is the same underlying truth: elephants need space. Physical space, yes — but also space in our moral and political imagination. Space to be complex beings with deep needs, long memories, and social lives that we are only beginning to understand. Amara: And that brings me to the close of today's episode — because that word, memory, keeps surfacing for me. Amara: The roads at Addo are memory pressed into earth. The bonds that allow a new calf to be born into a waiting, celebrating herd are memory — accumulated trust, accumulated care. The routes an Indian elephant walks through a corridor are memory, passed from matriarch to daughter to granddaughter. Even the grief of a herd standing at the bones of someone they loved — that is memory made physical. Made felt. Amara: We tend to think of memory as a private thing. Something that lives inside us and is gone when we are gone. But elephants remind us that memory can be collective, that it can outlive the individual, that it can shape the land itself. That is a kind of power that deserves our deepest respect. And our protection. Amara: This has been The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode moved you — and I hope something in it did — please subscribe, leave a review, and share with someone who might need to hear that the world is full of beings who love and grieve and remember. Links to all the stories we discussed today are in the link in show notes. Stay curious. I'll see you next time.