Article: The Depths of Animal Grief
“Elephants’ response to death has been called, “probably the strangest thing about them.” They almost always react to a dead elephant’s remains. Occasionally they react to a human’s. The remains or bones of other species, they ignore.
Joyce Poole writes, “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” They cautiously extend their trunks, touching the body gently as if obtaining information. They run their trunk tips along the lower jaw and the tusks and the teeth—the parts that would have been most familiar in life and most touched during greetings—the most individually recognizable parts.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/animal-grief/
Research on animals is one way to to approach the “ourselves” part of November TOK essay Prescribed Title #3. Anthropocentrism can interfere with research and even human bias can cause researchers to make mistakes.