Assam: New research finds evidence of prosocial behaviour in wild Asian elephants

A study published by a team of wildlife scientists provides strong evidence of helping behaviour in wild elephants in northeast India. 

On two separate occasions, adult male elephants rescued adult females that had been sedated by the research team as part of their study. This provides insights into the hidden world of elephant society, highlighting their remarkable social intelligence and cognitive capabilities.

This work was led by researchers from WWF-India, the Assam State Forest Department, the University of Cambridge, the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, and several other NGOs and government bodies. 

This study adds perspective to the long-standing question of whether altruistic behaviours exist in animal society by documenting these infrequent and notoriously challenging-to-observe events. The conventional notion is that animals help each other only if they are related or they can be of help in the future, though this does not always need to be the case. 

As part of their ongoing project to GPS-collar wild elephants and study their movement patterns and the causes of human-elephant conflict, the researchers conducted fieldwork in Sonitpur, Assam. 

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Their study sites included the Sonai-Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary—one of the last remaining critical habitats in the region—and Addabarie Tea Estate, which forms part of a vital elephant corridor connecting fragmented forest patches in the area.

In both locations, the team tranquillised an adult female elephant from a larger herd to safely fit her with a GPS collar. While the rest of the herd moved away from the research team, an unexpected event occurred: an adult male elephant approached the sedated female. In SonaiRupai, it was a tuskless male, known as a makhna, and in Addabarie, it was a tusker. Despite the perceived threat posed by the team’s presence, both males intervened by pushing the female out of sedation and away from the team—an entirely unexpected action. This counter-intuitive behaviour fits the criteria considered necessary to be ‘rescue behaviour’ and highlights an understudied aspect of their behavioural ecology.

The researchers note that such altruistic actions could stem from emotional contagion or empathic concern, phenomena in which individual animals respond to the emotional or physical state of other individuals, or even reciprocal altruism—a behaviour where help is extended without immediate benefit but with the potential for future rewards.

This study provides a difficult-to-document insight into cultural behaviours in the animal world, which in turn could help us better understand the ethical implications of how we manage wildlife. For instance, this underscores the need to look not only at numbers when framing elephant conservation goals but also at securing their quality of life.