Elephant-Human Conflicts: Enabling Practical Coexistence - Psychology Today

Amara: Welcome to The Long Memory — I'm Amara, an elephant biologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we follow elephants into the depths of what it means to feel, to remember, and to belong. I am so glad you're here. A warm thank you to our sponsors today: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. Now — today we've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk about a remarkable kind of elephant that carries a genetic secret in place of tusks, we're going to sit with the question of what happens when elephants and people have to share the same shrinking world, and we're going to end with something that honestly made me smile for the rest of the day. Let's get into it. Amara: So — MIND OF THE ELEPHANT. I want to tell you about makhnas. If you've spent time around Asian elephants, you know the word. A makhna is a tuskless male — and for a long time, people assumed that meant a lesser male. Smaller weapons, lower status, reduced threat. And that assumption, as it turns out, was wrong in some pretty fascinating ways. The story that brought this back into the news recently involves an elephant in Kerala, India — a makhna who had come into devastating conflict with people over a period of time, ultimately being captured after a series of fatal encounters. Now, I want to be careful here, because these situations are genuinely tragic on every side — for the communities involved, and for the elephant. But what the story reopened for a lot of researchers and wildlife managers is this question: what is actually going on inside the mind of a makhna? Amara: Here's what the science tells us. Tusklessness in male Asian elephants isn't just an aesthetic difference — it's a genetic trait, and in some populations it appears to be heritable. In African elephants, we've seen something remarkable happen in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, where decades of poaching that targeted tusked elephants for ivory drove a measurable increase in the frequency of tuskless females being born. Evolution in real time, shaped by human pressure. The genetics underlying tusklessness are still being studied, but the trait is real, it's inherited, and it appears to come with compensations. Amara: Makhnas, freed from the energetic cost of growing and maintaining large tusks, often redirect that biological investment. They can be heavier than their tusked counterparts relative to overall body condition. They tend to develop different behavioral strategies — more reliant on reading a situation, on timing, on social intelligence rather than a direct show of ivory. Researchers who study male elephant society — and it is genuinely a society, not just a loose collection of competitive loners — have noted that makhnas often develop what you might call a kind of lateral thinking. They can't win a tusking contest, so they don't play that game. They find other ways to assert themselves, to navigate hierarchies, to survive and reproduce. That is cognitive flexibility. That is intelligence in action. Amara: And here's the thing that I keep coming back to. When a makhna ends up in catastrophic conflict with humans, it's almost never because the elephant is uniquely aggressive by nature. It's because something has broken down — in habitat, in resources, in the buffers that used to keep elephants and people from meeting at the edges of their worlds. The elephant's intelligence isn't the problem. The intelligence is, in fact, what makes the situation so complicated, and so worth understanding. Amara: HEART OF THE HERD. I want to shift now to something that lives at the center of elephant society — and that's the question of what it costs an elephant, emotionally, to lose the world it knows. Because when we talk about human-elephant conflict, which is a phrase that appears in headlines constantly right now, we're often talking about it from the human side. Understandably. People's crops are destroyed, livelihoods threatened, lives lost. That is real and it matters enormously. But I want to spend a moment on the elephant's interior experience, because the science actually gives us a way in. Amara: Elephants have one of the most complex social structures of any land mammal. A herd is built around a matriarch — typically the oldest female, the one with the deepest memory — and that memory is not a metaphor. Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss's decades of work at Amboseli established that elephant matriarchs accumulate and use social knowledge over lifetimes that can span sixty years or more. They remember individual humans. They remember waterholes that only flood in exceptional wet seasons. They remember where they were safe, and where they were not. Amara: When habitat fragments — when a forest is cut, a corridor blocked, a traditional migration route turned into farmland — what you are actually doing to an elephant herd is severing them from their matriarch's accumulated map of the world. That is a profound loss. And elephant behavior in those situations often looks, to an outside observer, like erratic aggression. But what researchers increasingly describe is something closer to chronic stress, disorientation, and the behavioral consequences of that. Karen McComb's research on elephant social knowledge showed that herds with older, more experienced matriarchs made better decisions in unfamiliar or threatening situations — they were calmer, more coordinated, safer. Remove the matriarch, shrink her world, cut off her memory from the landscape she knows, and the herd becomes vulnerable in ways that are both ecological and deeply emotional. Amara: Elephants grieve. That's not a projection — it's documented. They return to the bones of their dead. They stand vigil. They carry the weight of loss in ways that look, in their structure, remarkably like what we'd recognize in ourselves. And when a herd is pushed into conflict, when they raid crops out of hunger or confusion, when they break through fences at night — they are not acting from malice. They are acting from need, and from a disrupted sense of a world that used to make sense to them. Holding that truth alongside the very real suffering of farming communities — that's where coexistence has to begin. Not with one side or the other. With both. Amara: AN ELEPHANT-AND-PEOPLE STORY. Okay. I promised you something that made me smile, and I'm going to deliver. Let's go to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington D.C., because there is a small elephant there named Linh Mai, and she recently took her first swim. Amara: Linh Mai is an Asian elephant calf — very young, very small in the way that elephant calves are small, which is to say she's already enormous by any other standard but absolutely dwarfed by the adults around her. And apparently, on the occasion of her first encounter with the zoo's elephant pool, she did what a lot of young elephants do, which is approach the water with that characteristic mix of intense curiosity and total physical confidence that elephant calves seem to be born with. And she paddled. The keepers called it her "pachyderm paddle," which is genuinely delightful phrasing. Amara: Now I want to tell you why this matters beyond the obvious joy of a baby elephant swimming, which is already sufficient reason to pay attention. Elephant calves learn to swim very young in the wild — it's an essential skill for herds that ford rivers, that follow ancient wet-season routes across landscapes laced with water. But a zoo-born calf doesn't have the Zambezi or the Periyar. She has her herd — which at the National Zoo includes adult females who have their own relationships with water — and she has her keepers, and she has the pool. And what researchers and elephant care specialists watch for in these moments isn't just "did she swim." It's: who did she look to? Who reassured her? What was her affect before and after? Amara: Because elephant calves are not born knowing the world. They are born into a relationship with it, mediated entirely through the herd. In the wild, a calf entering water for the first time is surrounded by females — her mother, her aunts, older calves who've done this before — all of whom provide a kind of social scaffold. Their calm bodies in the water communicate: this is safe. This is something we do. And what good elephant care in a zoological setting tries to replicate is exactly that — not just the physical experience, but the social context that makes it meaningful and safe. Amara: What struck me about Linh Mai's story is that she went in. She chose it. That moment of curiosity winning out over hesitation — that's an elephant being an elephant. That's a mind engaging with its world, a body discovering what it can do. And there is something quietly profound about that, in the middle of a news cycle full of hard stories about elephants in crisis, about conflict and poaching and habitat loss. A small calf in a pool, paddling. Life continuing. Curiosity intact. Amara: I want to close today with something I've been sitting with — a thread that runs through everything we talked about. The makhna's intelligence, the matriarch's memory, a calf's first swim. What connects them is this: elephants are not surviving in spite of who they are. They are surviving because of who they are — because of their memory, their social bonds, their ability to learn and adapt and, yes, to feel. And our challenge, as the species that shares this planet with them, is to match their complexity with our own. To bring the same depth of understanding to our policies and our farmland edges and our wildlife corridors that an elephant matriarch brings to navigating a landscape she has known for fifty years. Amara: The world's forest elephants are still under pressure — recent population assessments show that while poaching has declined in some regions, habitat loss and fragmentation continue to threaten their survival. In China, wild Asian elephant populations have actually been slowly recovering, and the country has been expanding protected areas and developing compensation programs for farmers affected by elephant movement. In communities across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, researchers and local people are working together on practical coexistence — better early warning systems, beehive fences, light deterrents, corridor mapping. None of it is simple. All of it matters. Amara: These animals carry so much — in their bodies, in their memories, in their bonds with each other. The least we can do is carry the knowledge of them carefully. This is The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you or taught you something, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves the natural world. Show notes with links to the research and stories we discussed today are available — the link is in show notes. Stay curious. Stay kind. And I'll see you next time.