Male Elephant Behavior Paper

A Look into Male Elephant Behavior Elephants have nonetheless always intrigued as us humans. They exhibit various emotions such as grief, empathy, anger and the bond between mother and infant is among the strongest in the animal kingdom, like us. They are magnificent creatures and are therefore vulnerable to much research. For an example, in an article written by Chelliah and Sukumar (2013), research was conducted on male Asian elephants in India and the function of musth (an intense, hormone-driven [increasing testosterone levels] stage of development of an adolescent male elephant; similar to what humans consider as puberty), body size, and tusks (an extended, pointed tooth) in relation to male-male competition. One would conceptualize that a male elephant’s tusks was used for fighting but this position does not necessarily prove to be true. At least what is known in African elephant

The elephants each had identification based on ear morphology and observers stayed in between the distance of 10 m to 400 m of observing elephants. Behavioral observations were organized as non-tactile dominant behavior (approach, charge, follow, chase, circular head shake, head raise, parallel walk, trunk raise, redirected aggression, stare, and sniff posterior), tactile dominant behavior (touch with trunk or tusks, fence with tusks, and push), or subdominant behavior (freeze, retreat, and vocalize). Observations lasted for a minimum of 1 hour when 2 males were within 500 m of each other participating in various activities (feeding, bathing, resting, etc.); “if competitive interaction was initiated within the hour the pair was observed for a maximum of 2 hours from the start of the interaction until one or both of the elephants disappeared from the observer’s view for more than 10 minutes” (Chelliah et. al