Body language isn't limited to humans - according to biologists Joyce
Poole and her husband Petter Granli of
ElephantVoices,
elephants communicate with each other through elaborate gestures as well
as sound:
Over the course of thousands of hours of observations, Poole came to
understand and essentially translate what elephants were communicating
to one another. She was also the first to discover musth in African
elephants, a state of heightened sexual and aggressive activity in males,
during which they display characteristic behaviors such as the gestures
classified in the database as ear-wave, trunk-bounce-drag, head-toss,
chin-in, and the distinctive musth-walk, a sort of elephant strut.
The image above of an elephant burying its tusk in the ground, shows
that it has a sense of humor:
Poole recalls how elephants at play used to charge her car, appearing
to trip and fall while tusking the ground (tusk-ground gesture) in front
of her vehicle. “I used to think that they really did trip—no
longer!” Poole said. “I have seen it enough times to know
that pretending to fall over in front of the car is all part of the
fun. It is one of the behaviors that led me to say that elephants have
a sense of self and a sense of humor. They know that they are funny.”
Read the rest over at this neat article by Christy Ullrich over at
NatGeo.
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