Victory! Freedom is in Sight for the Elephants at Roger Williams Park Zoo - In Defense of Animals

Amara: Welcome back to The Long Memory — I'm Amara, an elephant biologist and your guide into the inner lives of the most extraordinary animals on Earth. Whether you're a longtime listener or you're joining us for the first time, I'm so glad you're here. 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; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the people keeping the lights on so I can keep telling elephant stories, and I'm genuinely grateful. Today we've got a lot to get into — new research suggesting elephants have been reaching out to us for years, a conservation win that's been a long time coming, and a story from the forests of India that stopped me in my tracks. Let's go. Amara: MIND OF THE ELEPHANT Amara: Okay, so I want to start with something that honestly made me sit back in my chair when I read it. New research — covered recently by The Independent — suggests that elephants have been actively trying to communicate with humans for years. And I mean that very literally. Not passively coexisting. Not tolerating us. Reaching out. Deliberately. To us. Amara: Now, before I go further, let me give you a little context, because this lands differently when you understand what we already know about elephant communication. Elephants have one of the most complex vocal repertoires of any land mammal. They produce sounds across a huge frequency range — from deep, rumbling infrasound that travels miles through the ground, to high-pitched chirps and squeaks, to the trumpets everyone knows. A single rumble can carry information about identity, emotional state, location, and social relationships all at once. These are not simple signals. They are layered, contextual, and learned. Amara: What makes this new research so striking is the directionality of it. We've known for a long time that elephants adjust their communication based on who's listening — they use different calls with calves than with adults, different signals in high-stress situations versus calm ones. But this work suggests something more: that individual elephants, in certain contexts, appear to intentionally direct communicative behaviors toward specific humans. Pointing. Orienting. Waiting for a response. That's not random. That's not noise. That's the structure of a conversation. Amara: And here's the thing that gets me every time I think about this. Pointing — genuinely referential pointing, where you direct someone else's attention to a third thing in the world — is considered a hallmark of sophisticated social cognition. Human infants develop it around twelve months. It's one of the behaviors that researchers look for as a signal of theory of mind, of understanding that another being has a perspective different from your own. Very few non-human animals do it spontaneously toward humans. Great apes do, sometimes. Ravens, in limited ways. And apparently, elephants. Amara: What I find most moving about this isn't the cognitive achievement, impressive as it is. It's the patience of it. Elephants have been doing this, quietly, for years — according to this research — and we're only now starting to pay close enough attention to see it. They were already in the conversation. We just weren't listening. Amara: And that, I think, is a theme I come back to again and again in this work. The science keeps catching up to what the animals have been doing all along. Their minds didn't get more sophisticated because we started studying them. We just got better at looking. There's a humility in that worth sitting with. Amara: HEART OF THE HERD Amara: If the mind of the elephant is astonishing, the heart of the herd is where I always feel the ground shift under my feet. Because this is where elephant society becomes something that asks you to reconsider what words like "family" and "grief" and "home" really mean. Amara: Elephant herds are matriarchal — led by the oldest female, the matriarch, whose decades of accumulated knowledge are literally the survival manual for everyone around her. She knows where the water is when the dry season drags on. She knows which other herds are allies and which are strangers. She remembers the routes her mother walked. When researchers have studied herds that lost their matriarchs — to poaching, to drought — they documented something that looked, in behavioral terms, a lot like collective disorientation. The herd moved erratically. Made poor foraging decisions. Younger females stepped into the role but without that deep library of experience, and the cost was real and measurable. Amara: But I want to talk about something that's been on my mind since reading about a student researcher, Aniya Brown from NC State University, who has been working at elephant sanctuaries in Thailand. I love this story because it's about what happens when you give elephants space — not just physical space, but social space, the chance to just be elephants again. Amara: Sanctuaries like the ones in Thailand exist because elephants need more than food and safety. They need each other. And what researchers and caregivers observe there, again and again, is that given the opportunity, elephants will form deep bonds with other elephants they've never met before — sometimes within hours. They'll touch each other's faces with their trunks. They'll rumble softly in what researchers describe as contact calls. They'll stand flank to flank in a way that looks, to anyone paying attention, like comfort. Amara: This matters because it tells us something about how resilient these social bonds are, and also how fundamental they are to elephant wellbeing. An elephant in isolation — even a well-fed, physically healthy elephant in isolation — is not a thriving elephant. The research is clear on this. Chronic social isolation in elephants is associated with stereotypic behaviors, elevated stress hormones, and what can only honestly be described as depression. Amara: And then there's grief. I have to talk about grief, because it is one of the most documented and most haunting behaviors in the elephant ethological record. Elephants return to the bones of their dead — sometimes years later. They touch the skull, the tusks, the jaw, with their trunk tips, which are packed with sensory receptors. They linger. They go still. They have been observed doing this with the remains of elephants who were not their relatives, suggesting this isn't simply recognition of kin — it may be something broader. Something that looks uncomfortably like mourning. Amara: Cynthia Moss, who spent decades studying the elephants of Amboseli, documented this repeatedly. A matriarch named Emily, who died in the field, was visited by her family group over and over. Her daughter, Ella, was observed standing over her mother's body for an extended period, and returned to the site afterward. These aren't anecdotes I'm embellishing. These are field observations, recorded, published, scrutinized. They happened. Amara: I think about what it means to carry that — to be an animal whose memory is long enough, and whose love is deep enough, that you return to where someone was. That you keep looking. Amara: AN ELEPHANT-AND-PEOPLE STORY Amara: Alright, I want to end today with two stories that both gave me something — one is a hard-won victory, and one is a six-hour miracle through the forest. Amara: Let's start with Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. For years, animal welfare advocates — particularly the organization In Defense of Animals — campaigned for the elephants there, arguing that the zoo's conditions were inadequate for animals with the social, cognitive, and physical needs that elephants have. It was a long fight. These campaigns always are. Zoos are complex institutions with stakeholders and funding and decades of infrastructure, and changing course is genuinely hard. But the news recently is that freedom — real freedom, in the form of a transfer to a sanctuary — is in sight for those elephants. That's the word being used: victory. Amara: And I want to be careful here, because I hold complexity around zoos. Some do extraordinary conservation work. Some provide genuine care under real constraints. But I also know the research, and the research is unambiguous that for animals like elephants — who in the wild range dozens of miles a day, who live in multigenerational family groups, who use infrasound to communicate across kilometers — even the best-designed zoo enclosures are a profound limitation. A sanctuary, where they can live in large spaces with other elephants, is closer to what they need. So yes. This is a win. And it matters. Amara: But the story that really got under my skin this week came from Odisha, in India, reported by Telegraph India. Foresters there spent six hours guiding a herd of elephants — a whole herd — safely back to the forest. Six hours. Through highways. Along tracks. In what the reporters described as a careful, painstaking effort by the forest department to move these animals without separating them, without panicking them, without losing a single one. Amara: Think about what that takes. Elephants are not livestock. You cannot herd them with noise and expect them to comply. They read intention. They read body language. They communicate with each other constantly during stress — low rumbles passing through the group, physical contact, the matriarch setting the pace. For foresters to guide a herd successfully over that kind of distance, over that kind of terrain, over six hours — that requires knowledge, patience, and a genuine understanding of how these animals move and think and feel as a group. Amara: What I love about this story is what it says about the relationship that's possible between humans and elephants — not ownership, not domination, just careful, respectful coexistence. The foresters weren't conquering the herd. They were walking alongside it, reading it, giving it what it needed to find its own way home. Amara: And the herd made it. Every one of them. Back into the forest where they belonged. Amara: There's a version of the human-elephant relationship that looks like that. Like six hours in the dark, walking together. I think that's the version worth working toward. Amara: So. Here's what I want to leave you with today. Elephants have been reaching out to us — literally, according to new research, pointing and gesturing and waiting — for longer than we noticed. They grieve the ones they love, sometimes long after they're gone. They find each other across the distances of trauma and isolation and form bonds that look, by every measure we have, like friendship. And sometimes, humans show up for them in ways that give me real hope. Amara: Memory is the thread that holds all of this together. For elephants, memory is survival — it's the map, the relationship, the mourning, the recognition. And I think there's something in that for us too. The things worth remembering are the things worth caring about. The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode moved you or taught you something, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review if you have a moment — it genuinely helps — and share it with someone who loves animals, or who maybe just needs reminding that the world is full of minds we haven't fully met yet. Show notes with links to today's stories and sources are at the link in show notes. I'll see you next time. Stay curious.