‘Ancient Indian texts offer lessons for modern elephant conservation’ - The Times of India

Amara: Welcome to The Long Memory — I'm Amara, an elephant biologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we go deep into the inner lives of the most extraordinary animals on Earth. Every episode, we follow the trails elephants leave across science, culture, and history — and today's trails are remarkable. We've got ancient wisdom from India that turns out to be ahead of its time, a newborn calf whose arrival set an entire Kenyan herd into joyful chaos, and a big question unfolding right now in New York City about what we owe the last elephant in the Bronx. Thank you so much to our sponsors today — Ada, who help clients bring A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting, pronounced Ahh-Go, silicon development consultants covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. These are the partners who keep this show going — and I'm genuinely grateful. Now — let's get into it. Amara: MIND OF THE ELEPHANT. So I want to start today in a library. Not a modern research library, though we'll get there — I want to start in the kind of library that smells of old paper and older knowledge. Because there's a story coming out of India right now that I find genuinely thrilling, and it starts with texts that are, in some cases, thousands of years old. Researchers and conservationists have been revisiting ancient Indian literature — texts like the Matangalila, which translates roughly as "the sport of elephants," and the Arthashastra, the famous treatise on statecraft attributed to Chanakya — and what they're finding is striking. These texts describe elephant behavior, elephant psychology, elephant social structure in ways that map surprisingly well onto what modern field biology has confirmed. The Matangalila, for instance, describes the concept of musth — that dramatic hormonal state in bull elephants where testosterone surges, they become highly unpredictable, they secrete a dark fluid from glands near their temples. The ancient authors didn't have endocrinology. They didn't have blood tests. But they observed musth with enough precision that their descriptions are still recognizable to researchers working today. And that matters. Because observation is the foundation of science, whether you're a researcher with a GPS collar and a data spreadsheet or a mahout in ancient India whose life literally depended on understanding the animal in his care. What this tells us about elephant cognition is indirect but fascinating — because these texts also describe elephants as having something like memory, something like loyalty, something like emotional states that change over time. The ancient authors believed that how you treated an elephant in youth shaped its character for life. And here's the thing — modern research supports that. We now know that early trauma in elephants produces measurable behavioral dysregulation that persists for decades. We know that calves who lose their mothers to poaching show elevated stress hormones, disrupted social behavior, sometimes aggression, years later. The ancients were describing epigenetics without having the word for it. They were describing the long shadow of early experience on a mind that remembers everything. And that's the piece that keeps pulling me back — the memory piece. Because if these ancient observers were right about so much else, their insistence on the elephant's memory, its capacity to hold a grudge and also to hold a debt of kindness, starts to feel less like mythology and more like careful field notes. The lesson for modern conservation? We have more to learn from this archive than we might think. Sometimes wisdom doesn't expire. Amara: HEART OF THE HERD. Okay. I need to tell you about a birth. Because there is a video circulating right now — filmed in Kenya — and even on a small screen, even through a phone camera, what it captures is overwhelming. A female elephant has just given birth. And the herd — and I want you to picture this — the herd goes absolutely electric. You can hear it before you can fully process what you're seeing. There's this wave of rumbling, this deep, resonant sound that elephants produce partly in a frequency we can hear and partly in infrasound — vibrations so low they travel through the ground itself, felt more than heard. The females press in close. They're touching the newborn with their trunks — these incredibly sensitive, incredibly dexterous structures that contain more than forty thousand muscles and serve as nose, hand, and communication device all at once. They're smelling the calf. They're making contact. And then — and this is the part that gets me every single time — they start spinning. Several of the adult females just begin turning in place, this almost ecstatic movement, and they're rumbling and trumpeting and the energy is so palpable it comes through a screen recorded on a phone from who knows how far away. Now — is this joy? Is that a word we're allowed to use? I think about this a lot. I'm a scientist. I care about precision. But I also think that refusing to name what we're seeing, out of excessive caution, is its own kind of distortion. What we know — what the research tells us — is that elephants have highly developed limbic systems, the emotional processing centers of the brain. They have spindle neurons, the specialized cells associated in humans with empathy, intuition, and social awareness. They have lifelong bonds. They demonstrate what behaviorists call contagious excitement — a state where the arousal of one individual cascades through a group. Is that joy? I think joy is not a bad word for it. And here's what grounds it further. In elephant society, a birth is not just a personal event — it's a community event. Calves are raised by the whole herd. Females who have never given birth themselves — called allomothers — babysit, protect, and help educate calves. The matriarch's knowledge — where to find water in drought, which humans are safe, which are not — gets passed down through exactly this kind of tight, enveloping social group. A new calf entering this world isn't just a new individual. It's a new node in a web of memory and relationship that will sustain that animal for fifty, sixty, seventy years. No wonder the herd celebrates. The herd knows what it's gaining. Amara: And I want to stay with this theme of young elephants and their social worlds for just a moment longer, because there's a lovely story coming out of the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington right now. A calf named Linh Mai — she's just a little one, still in the early stages of her life — her social circle is growing. The zoo has been carefully and thoughtfully introducing her to more of the herd, expanding the web of relationships she can draw on, and that process is being documented with real care. It might seem like a small thing — a calf meeting more adults — but in elephant development, it's enormous. Calves learn by watching, by following, by having their exploratory attempts gently redirected by older animals. Every new relationship is a new teacher. Every new bond is a new anchor. Watching that happen, even in a zoo setting, is a window into the architecture of elephant society — the way it's built not just from hierarchy and genetics, but from accumulated, chosen connection. Amara: AN ELEPHANT-AND-PEOPLE STORY. I want to close today with something that's sitting right at the intersection of science, ethics, and — honestly — love. The Bronx Zoo is considering moving its last elephant, a female named Happy, to a sanctuary. And I want to tell you about Happy, because her story is one of the most important and in some ways most troubling in the modern history of human-elephant relations. Happy has been at the Bronx Zoo for decades. She arrived in 1977 — she was young then, caught from the wild in Thailand. And for a long time her life there was, by the standards of the day, considered acceptable. She had companionship. She had space. She became known to researchers when, in 2006, she participated in a now-famous mirror test. Scientists placed a large mirror in her enclosure and marked her forehead with a white X that she couldn't see or smell. And Happy — Happy touched the mark on her own face while looking at the mirror. She passed the test. She recognized herself. That is not a trivial thing. Only a handful of species have ever demonstrated mirror self-recognition — great apes, dolphins, magpies, and elephants. It's considered a marker of a particular kind of self-awareness, the understanding that the image in the mirror is you, that you have a body, a self, that can be observed. Happy demonstrated it clearly. And then the years went on. Her companions were moved or died. And Happy ended up alone. Alone in an enclosure. An animal whose mind can recognize itself in a mirror, whose species forms bonds lasting decades, whose memory reaches back across a lifetime — alone. The Nonhuman Rights Project actually went to court on her behalf, arguing that she deserved the legal status of a person under habeas corpus law. The courts ultimately ruled against that, but the case forced a conversation that needed to happen. And now, the Bronx Zoo is considering a move to sanctuary. A real sanctuary — acres of land, the company of other elephants, the chance for Happy to do what elephants do, which is to move, to explore, to remember, to connect. I don't know what the right answer is in every case — I know that accredited zoos do critically important conservation work, education work, research. I hold that complexity. But I also know what Happy demonstrated in that mirror. She knows she's there. And that knowledge has consequences for how we treat her. The move, if it happens, would be one of those moments where the human story and the elephant story intersect with some grace. And I'm watching it closely. Amara: And there's one more human-and-elephant story I want to touch before we close, because it's quieter but it stayed with me. In Sri Lanka, a politician named Sajith Premadasa is planning a life-size statue of a tusker named Kavantissa — a ceremonial elephant who was beloved in his community and has since died. Now, a statue might sound like a small cultural footnote, but I think it's actually something more. Across South and Southeast Asia, individual elephants have been named, celebrated, mourned, enshrined in local memory for centuries. Kavantissa was not just an animal to the people who knew him. He was a presence, a character, a being with a known history and a known face. The impulse to memorialize him — to cast him in permanent form — is the human version of what elephants do when they return to the bones of their dead and touch them with their trunks. It's the recognition that a particular life mattered. That a name deserves to outlast a body. That memory is a form of love. Amara: So here we are. Ancient texts and newborn calves, a self-aware elephant in a New York enclosure, a calf named Linh Mai learning who her people are, and a tusker in Sri Lanka who earned a monument. What ties all of it together, I think, is this — the elephant's capacity to hold the world in memory is not incidental to what they are. It is what they are. Their societies are built on remembered knowledge. Their grief is rooted in remembered love. Their joy at a birth is the joy of a community that knows, from long experience, how precious and how fragile each new life is. And when we sit with that — really sit with it — I think it changes how we see them. And maybe how we see ourselves. The Long Memory, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you, please share it — with a friend, a family member, a kid who loves animals or a grown-up who's forgotten to. Subscribe wherever you listen, and find links to all of today's stories in the link in show notes. Stay curious. Stay kind. And I'll see you next time on The Long Memory.