Human Impact on the Behavior of Social Animals

Hannia Farooqi

At the neuroscience seminar on April 8^th given by Dr. Darren Schreiber, the social behavioral aspect of neuroscience in animals was discussed. Many animals are called “social animals” because they display social behaviors. A few examples of social animals include fish, ants, and locusts. This social behavior can be demonstrated through the use of pheromones which are chemicals that are secreted or excreted by an animal and trigger a social response in members of the same species. Another example of social behavior is shown when ants battle which actively demonstrates the social psychology concept of “us versus them”. In comparison to social animals, political animals demand more complex brains and they typically form and later un-form groups. A few examples of political animals include hyenas, dolphins, crows, and elephants. An interesting phenomenon shown in hyenas is female domination of their groups. I’m going to explore the idea of social and political animals further with the example of the elephant.

                In the National Geographic article “Orphan Elephants Lack Social Knowledge Key for Survival”, African elephants are described as highly intelligent social animals which depend on their sophisticated communication skills for survival. Elephants develop highly complex social relationships over their long life spans. A study was done by behavioral ecologists from the University of Sussex to examine two different elephant populations, one was an undisturbed group living in Amboseli National Park in Kenya and another group was a translocated population in Pilanesberg Park in South Africa. These Pilanesberg Park elephants were moved to this location as calves after the culling of adults in Kruger National Park. Culling is the selective slaughter of a wild animal population in order to reduce the population size.

These translocated elephants displayed signs of negative long-term psychological impact which affected their decision-making. Their symptoms were very similar to those of humans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Pilanesberg population of elephants had difficulty with long-term learning and knowledge transfer due to the culling. Human activities of culling and relocation have a negative impact on the communication skills, cognition, and social understanding of these wild elephants.

During the study, the experimenters tested how elephants react to non-threatening social calls and threatening social calls. The results showed that the Amboseli elephants made better decisions in recognizing threatening calls, demonstrated by stronger listening, sniffing, and bunching behavior to protect the young, which showed a focus on attention on the most socially dominant individuals. On the other hand, the Pilanesberg elephants were not able to discriminate like the other group of elephants; the Pilanesberg elephants’ response did not change based on the social familiarity of the caller. This study demonstrated that culling and translocation cause initial trauma and then later cause a lack of leadership and group role models. The initial trauma is due to the young calves having to watch the butchering of their mothers and family members. Unfortunately, the people leading the culls didn’t realize that elephants are highly intelligent and social animals. Therefore, they didn’t predict the long-term implications the young calves would eventually face. Additionally, these elephants grew up without any role models so they responded very differently to threats and suffer from a profound loss of social knowledge which causes a decreased ability to make informed decisions. For highly cognitive and social species, such as elephants, social trauma that occurs at a young age can negatively impact development, causing persistent fear, infant abandonment, and hyper-aggression.

                Today, war, poaching, translocation, capture, and human disturbance to the landscape greatly impacts elephant populations. Furthermore, poaching is significantly damaging the structure of elephant societies and the social consequences of this will be seen in the future.

Barcus, Christie. “Orphan Elephants Lack Social Knowledge Key for Survival.” National Geographic. n.p., 31 Oct. 2013. Web. 21 April 2009.