Asian elephants mourn loudly and bury their dead calves, according to a study by Indian scientists. Researchers have identified five calf burials carried out by giant mammals in India’s northern Bengal region in 2022 and 2023, according to a study published this week. Journal of Threatened Taxa. In each case, they saw the herd carry the dead calf by its torso and legs, then bury it in the ground with its feet up.

“Through opportunistic observations, digital photographs, field records, and necropsy reports, we suggest that regardless of the calf’s cause of death, the carcasses were buried in an abnormal horizontal fashion,” the study said.

In one case, the authors write, the herd roared loudly and trumpeted around a buried calf. The study found that only calves were taken for burial because it was “impossible” to carry heavier adult elephants with the rest of the herd. Authors Parveen Kaswan and Akashdeep Roy said their study did not find “direct human involvement” in any of the five calf deaths.

Clear tracks of 15 to 20 elephants were seen around the cemeteries and on the soil covering the bodies of the calves; all of them died of multiple organ failure within three months to a year.

Elephants hid their calves in irrigation canals in tea plantations, hundreds of meters away from the nearest human settlements. Elephants are known for their social and cooperative behavior, but it has previously been noted that calves burial has only been “briefly investigated” in African elephants and not among their smaller Asian cousins.

Wild elephants in both Africa and Asia are known to visit carcasses in various stages of decomposition, but this study found different behavior from the herds it studied. In all five cases, the herd “left the area within 40 minutes of burial” and then avoided returning to the area, choosing instead different parallel migration routes.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has recognized that Asian elephants are in danger of extinction. About 26,000 of them live in the wild, mostly in India and some in Southeast Asia, surviving an average of 60-70 years outside captivity.