Elephants Remember the Scents of Human Caregivers After Many Years, Study Finds

The saying goes that an elephant never forgets, and there is evidence that they remember waterholes they have visited and other elephants they have met after a long time.

But does this exceptional long-term memory extend to humans and members of other species?

“There are exciting stories of Asian elephants that suggest this,” said Martin Kränzlin, lead author of a new study, in a press release from Kiel University. “For example, it has been reported that elephants threw stones at a former owner they didn’t like when they met again many years later. However, these are only anecdotal reports.”

The study, “Do African Savanna Elephants (Loxodonta africana) Show Interspecific Social Long-Term Memory for Their Zoo Keepers?” has provided the first concrete evidence that elephants are able to recognize their keeper’s scent, even after a long separation.

Published in the journal Zoo Biology, the research was carried out at Lower Saxony’s Serengeti Park in Hodenhagen, Germany. Bibi and Panya, two female elephants, had moved to the wildlife park from the Berlin Zoo 13 years earlier.

“We contacted the former zookeepers in Berlin, a total of three men,” recalled Kränzlin, who works at the Wilhelma Zoological-Botanical Garden. “For our experiment, they wore a T-shirt for eight hours, which we later used as a scent stimulus. We also recorded a short spoken sentence from them and took portrait photos of them.”

For the experiment, two racks were placed side by side outside the elephants’ enclosure. On one rack, the researchers displayed a life-size portrait print of a former keeper or one of the T-shirts they had worn. On the other was placed the corresponding stimulus of someone unknown to the elephants.

From their enclosure, the elephants could see both racks, but weren’t able to touch them with their trunks. They regularly attempted to reach them, however, to examine the items more closely.

“We filmed the behavior of each elephant we tested,” Kränzlin said in the press release. “We then used the videos to analyze how often and for how long the animal extended its trunk towards the racks.”

The researchers hypothesized that a familiar stimulus would arouse greater interest, indicated by Panya and Bibi attempting to reach those stimuli more often and for a longer amount of time.

The research team found that the pair of pachyderms did just that, but only if the stimulus was a previously worn T-shirt with the scent of a familiar keeper. The differences between the recordings of spoken sentences and the portrait photos were not statistically significant, which wasn’t surprising, since proboscideans — elephants and close relatives — have blurred vision, but an outstanding sense of smell.

“Our results are a clear indication that elephants can at least remember the scent of their former keepers, even decades later,” said Professor Christine Böhmer, leader of the study and a Kiel University professor of zoology and functional morphology of vertebrates, in the press release. “Nevertheless, further studies with a larger number of individuals are needed to confirm the results.”

The results point to the importance of the captive elephant-caregiver relationship.

“The results are also interesting for keeping elephants in zoos,” the press release said. “Because if the pachyderms really do remember their keepers for so long, then this suggests that they are pretty important to the animals. A stable relationship with their human caregivers can therefore potentially have a very positive effect on the well-being of zoo elephants.”