enigmaticevil: Well that’s the fucking saddest thing I’ll read all day.
Rexsplosion: If I received a phone call from my dead father it would destroy the rest of my life searching for him.
OCesq: The whole article is an interesting read. They bury their dead (cover them with things, close enough), visit the spots an elephant has died, and touch the dead body the way they would greet a living elephant. 😢
Here4TheMemesPls: 😢 I’m glad they didn’t pursue this further
314159265358979326: I feel bad enough when I play a kitten video on YouTube and my cat looks for the kittens.
Randolm: This is beyond heartbreaking. But unfortunately it takes information like this to help in the understanding of how intelligent, empathic and caring these creatures are. I think most people hearing this story would reconsider any perception of the ‘beauty of ivory’ that they may hold.
monster_mentalissues: That’s absolutely heart breaking. Elephants are such amazing creatures.
fkdsla: This is really sad.
plknz: When one of my cats died, the other one knew what was going on. A friend gave me a stuffed animal with a similar pattern, and I put the collar my late cat had been wearing on the stuffed animal. The sight of the stuffed animal alone was enough to trigger howling, the scent on the collar only made it worse. I’ve never seen anything like it from her since.
caffiend98: The elephant family eventually forgave them, but never forgot.
sleepysnoozyzz: And to this day that family of elephants speak of the time the ghost spoke from the beyond.
umritazzo: Elephants may be all big and tough but they have feelings too and those researchers hurt damn near every one of them
nattykat47: My mom died last year and sometimes I’ll hear a snippet of a voice on the train or in line at Walgreens that sounds just like her. It’s crazy how instinctively your brain reacts to familiar sounds– I turn toward the sound and expect to see her a full second before remembering she’s dead. It feels completely jarring, totally pulls you out of reality for a moment.
Biologically speaking, it makes sense that your mother’s voice is the most hard-wired sound in your brain.
K3R3G3: Saddest. TIL. Ever.
SuperbCrawdad2: They may not speak in a way we can interpret and communicate back to them, but because of stories like this I respect these animals in a special kind of way. They can’t do trigonometry, but according to my last exam neither can I, so I respect them as being nearly intellectually equal and for that reason I feel so much sympathy knowing the poaching that elephants face and the fishing dolphins face because these mammals are almost my intellectual brothers.
lost_azimuth: You have to wonder if higher beings have ever done this kind of shit to us.
cosmicmailman: elephants are extremely intelligent creatures with complex rules of hierarchy, generational learning and the capacity for empathy and strong bonds with humans or other elephants
the fact that people (including our president’s children) hunt them for sport is repulsive
wayfarer73: That’s heartbreaking.
DIGGYRULES: My dad died years and years ago…and I had never watched a single video of him after he died. I just couldn’t. Last year, my sister posted a short video clip of my dad on Facebook and I watched it. The MINUTE I heard my dad’s voice, I broke down and sobbed. I hadn’t been sad before watching it. I hadn’t been feeling nostalgic. But the minute the sound of his voice touched my ears, I lost it. Hearing his voice after all these years was like a knife to my soul. That’s what I thought about when I read this post. Those poor elephants.
TheAfricaBug: Kruger safari guide here.
I’m not surprised at all. Elephant herds have an infrasonic language. So far we’ve identified more than 400 words or phrases. Things like “come here”, “water”, “watch out for the predator”. Note that of those 400, we’ve been able to positively identify only about 50 of them. So what they’re saying is still for the largest part a mystery to us. Bulls seem to have a language that’s less elaborate than breeding herds, so right no in my area there’s a research group focusing on that.
This little experiment not only proves elephants have a language, but that they can recognise individuals through that language.
RXL: [Did you know that the founder of Jimmy John’s likes to shoot and kill these animals for fun?](https://assets.change.org/photos/3/vx/ld/NKVXLDSOcLDNBSc-1600×900-noPad.jpg?1423789680)
mulder_lite: maybe aliens showing us recordings of dead people is what has happened when we think we see a ghost
Umlovingit: An elephant never forgets but I sure hope they do. It’s heartbreaking and definitely beyond our understanding how they were actually felling.
H_Lon_Rubbard: And that’s the story of how the Elephants first began to believe in ghosts.
Deathyish: Really great title that tells a whole story in just five sentences. It reminds me of Hemingway’s six-word short story:
“For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
punkrockprincess805: Heartbreaking
rollingko2: This is so much worse than fake throwing a tennis ball for my dog.
grimskull1: Poor animals
PsychNurse6685: This is so sad. They’re such amazing animals
Lines never touch
VintageOG: I’ve already wasted to much mental energy thinking about this gif in the past
dw_jb: I see it works, but I cannot imagine how it’s possible
ieetpeople: This annoys my brain.
AmericanDoggos: Hey. Stop it.
travinavan: Also, worth noting that it takes two revolutions to return to its original state, which helped me accept the idea of quantum particles having spin 1/2
Krehlmar: It’s amazing to think there’s actually maths and formulas behind this
mto3rdpower: Reminds me of how to turn a sphere inside out
https://youtu.be/sKqt6e7EcCs