Jodi Picoult Talks About Elephants

Towards the end of last year, bestselling American author Jodi Picoult, travelled over to Northern Ireland for a one off appearance at The Theatre At The Mill, Newtownabbey, to talk about her research for her latest book, ‘Leaving Time’ which is about the relationship between humans and elephants. After reading an extract from the book, Jodi then shared some of her research and new found knowledge about elephants.

1. Elephants are the largest land animals. They are herbivores, they weigh 7 – 10 pounds.
2. Elephants are recognisable by tusk, by voice, by personality, by hair and most importantly by their ears. The edges of an elephants ears are all different from each others. So their exactly like our fingerprints and that’s how most researchers tell them apart.
3. They live for up to 50 – 70 years in the wild and they live in families of two – ten adult females who are led by the largest oldest female of the group who is called the Matriarch
4. Babies are allomothered that means it really does take a village to raise a calf, it’s not just the biological mom who takes care of her calf. It is all the aunties and cousins and older siblings who all pitch in to raise that baby and in fact if you watch elephants in the wild and a calf stumbles and falls, no less than five or six elephants rush over to see if it’s ok.

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5. Males are chased out of the herd when they are about thirteen years old by the Matriarch and it’s to be coincidently be when they discover girls. They come into must which is the Hindu word for madness and then the Matriarch forces them out. We used to think that the males, the bull elephants roamed very solitary lives on the savannah plains but now we know that they actually form small groups of boys, almost like a miniature fraternity and the older guys teach the younger guys what to do
6. Elephants have a remarkably large and complex brain. They are not only capable of learning and remembering but also feeling fear and pain and loss. In the animal sanctuary in Tennessee, they had to institute a no fly zone with helicopters because everytime a helicopter came overhead all the elephants would go insane. For most of these elephants, the only helicopter that they have heard in their lifetime was 50 years ago when they were calves in Africa during the governmental cull to control elephant population during which government hunters were shooting
7. Elephants have also got extraordinary powers of empathy and in particular a very special kind of empathy. As humans, we have such a thing called cross species empathy which means that even though you are not a dog and your dog is not a human, you would take your dog to the vet if it was sick, we’re willing to do that for other species. That doesn’t happen very often in the animal world except for elephants. Elephants have been seen multiple times rescuing rhino babies that have been caught in the mud or caught in the ditch.
8. And finally relationships between elephants last a lifetime.

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