Elephants’ Mysterious Touches of Humanity Illustrated in New Film

A family of elephants comes across an unrelated mother desperately trying to raise her prone and dying calf to its feet in a futile effort to save its life.

Slowly, the herd approaches the frantic mother, reaching out to her with their trunks, caressing and touching her face and body. It is eerily reminiscent of the human gesture of putting an arm around someone’s shoulder.

“It looks like they have a sense of feeling,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a zoologist who has been studying elephants since the 1960s. “They have memory and an ability to empathize, to know how their actions are affecting the feelings of another elephant.”

The scene is among several touching examples in a new large-format film of how “human” elephants can appear. Douglas-Hamilton was a technical consultant on “Africa’s Elephant Kingdom,” made by Discovery Channel Pictures for use in theaters where IMAX is shown.

The 40-minute movie opened in May and has been released in Africa, the United States, Australia and Canada. It was shot over six months last year in several national parks in Kenya and narrated by Avery Brooks, who plays Cmdr. Sisko in the TV series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

The Scottish-born Douglas-Hamilton, founder of the group Save the Elephants, helped guide the film crew to the elephants, eventually focusing on a small family, or clan, that became the movie’s centerpiece.

Following the clan, headed by a matriarch dubbed Torn Ear, the movie aims to illustrate all aspects of elephant life from birth to death, and to uncover some of the mysteries surrounding elephants.

The camera captured Torn Ear and her family stumbling across the bleached white bones of a bull elephant lying in the dirt. With trunks extended, they explored the bones, sniffing the hollow skull and tusks and picking up pieces of the skeleton.

Douglas-Hamilton, who pioneered the study of wild elephants, believes the key to understanding this behavior lies in elephants’ immensely powerful sense of smell, controlled by huge olfactory lobes in the brain where scents are detected and analyzed.

“It was an intense olfactory and tactile experience,” he said. “I think they were interested in maybe who it was.”

The crew got firsthand experience of the less gentle side of elephants when they came too close to a herd and triggered a charge by a matriarch. With a camera mounted on the back of their Jeep and Douglas-Hamilton at the wheel, the enormous elephant was filmed chasing the vehicle down a dirt track, catching up with it and thrusting its tusks just feet away from the terrified crew.

Australian producer and director Michael Caulfield said the moment was scary but produced amazing pictures.

“Her tusks came on either side of the camera,” he said. “The crew is turning around, faces all contorted, screaming, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ ” Finally we sped up again and as a last parting gesture she raised her trunk and spat straight into the lens.”

Elephants’ wariness in the face of man stems from the heavy poaching of the 1970s and 1980s that wiped out many of Africa’s herds. From an estimated population of 1.3 million in 1979, Africa’s elephants now number about 380,000.

Though poaching has decreased with help from an ivory ban, a limited trade in ivory has recently restarted from African countries with healthy elephant populations, such as Zimbabwe.

With the human-like behavior shown in Discovery’s film, Douglas-Hamilton hopes to raise public awareness of elephantine intelligence and encourage their conservation, like other animals people have imbued with such characteristics.

“It is really no more acceptable to shoot an elephant for pleasure or ivory than to shoot a dolphin or an ape,” he said.