Stuff You Should Know - Elephants: The Best Animals?

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

Elephants are pretty much the best. Why? Josh and Chuck will let you know in great detail in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry.

We're just feeling wacky over here. You wanna know why? Why? Because this is the stuff you should know about maybe the greatest animal walking the planet, and I'm including human beings. Yeah. Elephants.

I'm big on elephants. Yes. Love, elephants might be Emily's spirit animal. She hasn't decided yet. Yeah, I can say 100% it is Yumi's. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Wow, they have the same spirit animal.

That's kinda neat. Yeah, I know. I like that. I didn't know that. I didn't know Yumi was an elephant-er. She is big time into elephant-ation. An elephant-ist. Mm-hmm.

All right, Charles, you ready for this? Yes, and really quickly, because we love elephants. We wanna go on a safari one day, you know, I've mentioned before. Yeah. But now I know, and we'll get to this later. I was like, man, I wanna swim with those things. Don't do it.

No. Shouldn't do it. Don't ride them. Nope, don't do any of those things where you see people on Facebook bragging about riding and getting bathed by elephants. Don't do it. Yeah, it's true.

Like that's not ethical or humane because, we'll just say it now. The reason why is because two elephants are wild animals. They're not domesticated. Although they display some really bizarre affectionate behavior towards humans that can make you think they are domesticated. They're still wild animals.

So to train them to basically ensure that they're not ever going to, you know, stomp a person or something like that, you have to take them as babies and what's called crushing their spirit and just basically scare them so bad. Or beat them physically. Right.

That's part of the process of crushing their spirit. They're like, yeah, beat them, berate them, starve them. Tie their legs together. Keep them in a pen. All to basically teach them that humans are in charge and that they should be scared to death of doing anything untoward toward a human.

That's how you can ride an elephant or how you can bathe with an elephant. Or Yumi wanted a painting by an elephant. Like there's elephants that make paintings. There's one here in Atlanta. Okay. That makes paintings. So we researched it right before we were about to order it.

She's like, wait a minute, let me just see if this is okay. And it turns out that they basically use the same techniques to make an elephant do what a human wants it to. You have to be very cruel to them usually. So there you go people, don't do it. Yeah, that was a weird intro.

Well, it was in my craw. Obviously it was in yours. A little bit. But let's talk about elephants, the good stuff. There are three species. You probably grew up thinking like I did that there's the African elephant and the Asian elephant. Sure, everybody knows that.

But now they have broken down the African element, the elephant into two camps, the bush elephant and the forest elephant, both African. And like I said, for many, many years, and you will still see in a lot of places just two species, but that is not true anymore. No, one, two, three. So in the bush elephant and the forest elephant

are so closely related that if they run up against one another because some of their habitats kind of overlap, they could reproduce and have babies, which no problem whatsoever. But the Asian elephant is so distantly related to them, even though they seem, you know, it's just another kind of elephant. Yeah, it's an elephant.

That they probably, they could conceivably have a kid. And actually one was born in a zoo in the 70s, but he died after like, I think 12 days of an infection. That they probably aren't really supposed to, aren't supposed to breed, I guess, is how you'd put it. Procreate. Right, have offspring. Yeah, so we're gonna be talking about all three,

not interchangeably, we'll point out when we're talking about what. But the African bush elephant, those are the biggest ones. They have the biggest ears, or at least larger than the Asian elephants, and both sexes for the African bush elephants are more likely to have tusks. Some male Asian elephants have tusks,

but they're not as prominent. That's where you see the smaller tusks. And then all three species have five toes on the front feet, but the African bush elephant has three toes on the rear. Asian elephants have four toes on the rear, on each foot. Yeah, there's a lot of different toes going on. A lot of different toes. And the African forest elephant is generally

about the same shape as his bush friend, but they have straighter tusks because they're going, it makes sense, they're going through the forest, so their tusks don't stick way out and get caught on every other tree that they're walking by. Yes, and I thought this was really interesting. The African forest elephants are so elusive that they have no idea how many there are.

All of the ideas about their behavior and the stuff that they do is just assumptions made based on the bush elephant that they're related to. They're that good at keeping away from humans. I just think that's amazing. Yeah, and they're a little bit smaller than their friends on the Savannah, but they have the same toe arrangement

as the Asian elephant, which is interesting. So I had never really thought about it, but a lot of the elephants, when I think of elephants, I never realized I was thinking of two different species, but they really do, the Asian elephant and the African bush elephant, they have a lot of differences that you can just very quickly see, which is which kind.

The Asian elephant has kind of like the rounded dome head and they have kind of a hump back and they are a little smaller. And then the African bush elephants, they're very, very big with the big old ears and they have basically what's called like a saddleback. It's kind of flat-ish. Right.

Or maybe even concave a little bit too. Yeah, and here's one of the facts of the show for me is... There's like 50 in here. There's so many. But elephants have, they have tuskness, like we have handedness. They use their right or their left tusk more often than the other. And if you ever wonder which tusk is the more dominant one,

look and see which one's shorter, because that's the one that gets worn down quicker. I thought that was amazing. Pretty neat. I just figured they were interchangeable. Yep, nope. Yep, nope. So like it's really kind of,

I had to stop and put myself into this like standing, like imagine myself standing next to these elephants for like measurements for the average. Yeah, you're like what, six feet? Yeah, just about. I'm pretty good. I'm like a human dollar bill. You know dollar bills like a little about six inches.

Same thing here, I'm six feet, okay? So just stand me next to something and be like, oh, it's about six feet. Okay. Don't you know about the dollar bill? Well, no. Is that used as a measuring device when you're short of a ruler?

Yeah, it's about six inches. What if you have no cash, but you do have a ruler? Then you're in luck. Can you spend the ruler in a hat shop? You could considerably trade it. Remember that guy who traded, he went from a paperclip to like a house trading up? Oh yeah, that guy.

That guy could turn a ruler into cash. He and Soybom share an apartment now in upstate New York. Soybom. All right, so let's talk about the size of these ladies and men because... Okay, so everybody imagine me standing next to an elephant and they'll really drive all this home.

Yes, right. So an African forest elephant is Josh's height up to about eight feet. At the shoulder. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you don't measure from the top of the dome. I wonder why they do that with animals.

That's always kind of the case, right? Because I think if the animal was like, well, I want to seem taller, they could just lift their head up very high or something, you know. Or if they're trying to keep a low profile, they keep their head down. So the shoulder, it's tough to, you know. Like when they're having their kindergarten class picture

taken. Right. The African bush elephant is taller. It's about eight to 10 feet at the shoulder. That's the biggest one. Yeah, four to six tons, two to five tons on the forest African. And then Asian is seven to nine feet,

about three to five short tons. And we should say there's a lot of variation in size here because I think one of these experts said that the outliers can be as big as 25% taller or larger overall than the average, which is a huge variation. Yeah, there's, I think the record for an Asian elephant. And remember there, you know,

at the shoulder seven to nine feet, that's still pretty, pretty good size. But the record was 11 and a quarter feet. Man, that's a big elephant. Like, can you imagine that's almost two of me? Yeah. Like me standing on my own shoulders, maybe squatting down just a little bit at the shoulder.

That's how big that elephant was. And when you, when you're talking short tons, that's 2000 pounds. So like an African bush elephant can get on average up to 12,000 pounds. That's a big boy or girl. Yeah, the boys are a little bit bigger. And they live a long, long time.

Here's sort of some inspiring and sad facts. They can live 50 to 70 years. They've found and recorded at least one elephant that lived to be 86 that has set the record, which is just amazing. But here's the saddest thing. If you are a zoo elephant, you live maybe less than half as long.

So I have to say this, the RSPCA in West Sussex, England has been, their numbers have been controversial before. Oh, really? But in this 2008 study, they took 4,500 African and Asian elephants that lived in European zoos over the course of 45 years. And this is what they came up with.

So, I mean, even in the article, the people weren't necessarily contesting this data, but I think the way that they explained it was that this was old data. And so it gave you a good idea of how long elephants lived in captivity a few decades ago, back before they knew more about keeping them in zoos. Yeah, and here's what it says.

It said 36 years in a national park in Kenya, 17 years in a zoo. But it looks to me like, unless I'm reading this wrong, that elephants that work in timber camps, they're very strong. So they are still used in timber camps to haul wood and trees and things.

They actually live longer than zoo elephants? Yeah, so the timber elephants of Burma, of Myanmar, are very well taken care of from what I understand. Like they're considered semi captive. And for like the last 100 years or so, the people of Burma have used them to basically move huge trees, right? To pull them out of the forest for logging and stuff.

But they're really well cared for. There's like government veterinarians that do health checks and each elephant has their own log. And from what I saw, which just seems mind blowing to me because they're being held captive in a way to work for humans. And so just based on our track record of using animals like that,

it's just weird to me that they would be very well taken care of, but supposedly they are. And they're considered semi captive because at night they're allowed to just kind of wander around and go free in the forest. And they interact with wild Asian elephants. And that's how they actually reproduce.

They're not like, there's no kind of reproductive oversight. It's just go wild, you know? And they apparently live very long because they're very well taken care of. Yeah, and here's a little factoid for you when they get pregnant in those working camps, they get maternity leave for about a year. Yes.

So a couple of more quick facts, and then we'll take a break. Little BB elephants are cared for by their mothers until they're anywhere between 13 and 20 years old. So it's almost like, well, not quite, but it's almost like the human experience. A little bit, yeah. You know, somewhere in there. I would doubt if you're sending your 13 year old off.

But if you're a terrible parent, maybe. Let's say it's 13 to 20, let's say that's 18 years. It's about like a high school age. All right. And that's also when they reach sexual maturity. It takes about 20 to 22 months of gestation, which is the longest gestational period of any animal, I'm sorry, any mammal.

And a little BB elephant weighs between 150 and 250 pounds. That's pretty cute. Should we take a break? Yes. More poundage facts right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days

of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, I just think it's adorable that both of our wives got us into elephants. We're going to have to take a safari together. We should do that. Although that's very dangerous. Like, we don't even fly to, you know, Tennessee together.

Well, we're not. We are, the plane will go down and the podcast will be over. I guess we could trade off then. It would be a pretty amazing story though. Like, the podcast would go down in history if you and I were eaten by tigers. That would be kind of, that'd be a heck of a way to go. Well, Emily and you make it, just take it over.

There you go. And it would just all be about animals. They should do something together sometime, you know? Like, they should read, listen or mail or something like that. Or they should just start their own show called Stuff You Should Know About Our Husbands. There you go.

People would love it. It's a good idea. I don't know if we would. No, we would not. They'd be like, you think they're so great? Let us tell you about these schlubs. No, no, no, no, no. These putzes.

So, there should be a ding sound because you can use putz on every show from now on. All right, elephants eat 100 to 600 pounds of food in a day and drink between 16 and 40 gallons of water. Say that again, brother. 100 to 600 pounds of food in a day. And they are eating, and I love this, they basically spend their day

when they're awake, 14 to 16 hours a day, just sort of looking to eat and drink. Yeah, which is, it stinks. Like, if you think about it, the reason why they have to eat that much is not because they're so big, but because, well, it is in part, but mostly because they're herbivores

and their digestive system is ridiculously inefficient. Yeah. Like, if elephants are as intelligent as they appear to be, and probably even more than they appear to be, once we start to like learn more about them, I think all it's gonna do is just provide a cascading series of woes. They, like, if they didn't have to spend

so much of their time looking for food, what would they be doing? Maybe they would learn to paint on their own. Maybe. So, the reason why they eat so much again is because they don't digest a lot of that food. And so, undigested stuff comes out as poop in such frequency that you can actually make paper out of it.

There's elephant poop paper. People use it and they get the fiber out of the elephant poop to make paper with. Oh, wow. That's how undigested so much of their food is. Yeah, they eat, like you said, they are herbivores. So, they eat all kinds of plants. They love fruit.

I imagine that's like the sweet, sweet nectar when compared to, you know, like dry bamboo. And they can study their poop and learn a lot from their poop, just like most animals. Well, elephants don't study their own poop. How do you know? Well, I guess they might. No, of course, scientists study it.

And they can learn a lot by, you know, because like you said, those African forest elephants, they're very elusive in the forest and you can't find them, but you can find their poop everywhere. Yeah, you can tell their anus size from their poop size, which sounds hilarious and it is, but you also can tell like the age

and the general size of the elephant based on their anus size, which you find based on their poop size. That's right. Plus you can make a banging paper out of it too. Sure. The range, the African bush elephants have a very wide range across Africa,

south of the Sahara Desert. And the forest elephant are in rainforest, that's the name, near the equator, sort of around Cameroon, is where they're largely centered. As far as Asian, they're all over Southeast Asia. They have some in China even, but India is really where you're gonna find

the most Asian elephants. See, Thailand, Indonesia, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, they each have more than 1,000 and we already talked about Burma a little bit. They have the second largest total population worldwide. I guess, except for India. They have the largest captive population though, at least 5,000 all working in those government timber camps,

which again, I'm sure somebody's gonna write in and be like, no, no, no, no. They're not taking very well care of, but I didn't see anything like that, which I'm just astounded by. I don't know if that's coming across or not, but I'm really astounded. Yeah, and if you listen to our episode,

well, I guess it's either from last week or it'll be next week and then I'm predicting the future about elephant swimming in the, which one was that? Loch Ness. Loch Ness. They do love to swim and they are very floaty. They're very buoyant. They won't, you're not gonna find

an elephant drowned in the water. They can not only swim, but if they get tired, they can just float. Bob. Yeah, they can just bob in the water. And apparently an elephant has been recorded as swimming 48 kilometers, 30 miles. Pretty amazing.

And six hours at a stretch. Yeah. That's pretty nuts. And baby elephants, one of the greatest things you can do is sit around and watch baby elephants splashing in kiddie pools on YouTube. They love it. They love to swim.

Yeah, let's talk about the trunk, because when you see an elephant and you watch this, if you'd like really study an elephant for a while, and you look at that trunk, it's amazing. It looks like a completely separate living thing almost sometimes. Yeah, but it's a nose. It's basically their upper lip

and their nose combined together in this elongated form. Yeah, but when they, you watch an elephant, a lot of times they're just standing still, but this trunk is doing so many crazy looking things. I see what you mean. Yeah, it just looks like its own animal almost. Like a thing from the Adams family, the disembodied hand.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Or the alien hand syndrome guy from our short-lived TV show. Right, right. Basically the same thing, right? Exactly. And one of the big theories is that trunk, and this makes a lot of sense to me evolutionarily speaking, is that trunk developed as compensation?

Basically, I can reach things higher without having to grow, or I can get things on the ground without having to crouch down and put my head on the ground, which makes me very vulnerable to attack. So I have this big, long, extended nose that can go get stuff on the ground or up above me, and I can still sort of be safe.

Yes. Okay, so it's a nose that you can use to get things with, including water. Apparently it holds up to two gallons of water in a trunk. Just in the trunk. But it's also really dexterous, I guess. Yeah. It has 100,000 muscles in it,

both fast-twitch and slow-twitch. So I've read that an elephant can pull a limb off of a tree with its trunk, or pluck a blade of grass out of the ground. Wow. Like it can do it all basically. It can deal cards, whatever. But you shouldn't train an elephant to deal cards.

No, just put the cards down and walk away. Yeah. And if it happens, it happens. That is the motto of dealing with elephants. And initially, you know, evolution might have said, hey, use these great things to drink water out of. But like we said, and we'll continue to hammer this home, elephants are super smart.

So they said, hey, I've got this really long fifth arm that has 200,000 muscles in it. So I can get food and I can bathe myself and I can pick up dust and mud and put it all over my body if I don't want to get sunburned or if I want to have a sort of lo-fi insect repellent, or I can communicate with my buddy over there with my trunk. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff they do with their trunk

that we're starting to figure out. There's a group called Elephant Voices. And they have an elephant gestures database based on decades of studying elephants up close. And they have a really complex and intricate, basically a sign language that includes more than just their trunk, but their trunk plays a big role in it too.

Yeah, there's one example on this article, flop trunk on head. And that is an elephant basically raising the head vertically and then flipping their trunk really high up in the air and letting it plop down on their head. That is a very specific play-based gesture. Kind of a joyful play. Yeah, like if you see an elephant doing that,

they're having a good time. Yeah, the elephant gestures database, the names of the different things, the gestures sound like they were all written by Nell. Flop trunk on head. Mr. Chikamak. So I've got another fact of the podcast for you. You ready?

All right. Baby elephants suck their trunks like human babies suck their thumbs. Oh my God. Isn't that amazing? I mean, forget about it, man. I know. I can't even with this stuff.

I know. Oh, and now Tim Burton's gonna ruin it all with a new Dumbo movie. Oh, is it live action or? You know, yeah, I think it's live action in CGI. Why, he's gonna ruin it? Sure he is. Aw, poor Tim Burton.

He's the ruiner of things. You ruined everything, you ruiner. Elephants, all elephants originated in Africa and then spread throughout the world from there, including North America across like everything else across the Bering Strait land bridge or ice bridge depending on when it was. And then all the way into South America from there.

Yeah, you can make a pretty strong case that they drew humans into North America because they migrated first and humans probably followed them as hunters over like millions of years later. Oh yeah. So the, this is weird. So the mammoth and the elephant share a common ancestor.

Their most recent common ancestor is six million years in the past. Which means the elephants and mammoths coexisted at the same time. Elephants have been around a really long time. It's just, I guess when they moved out of Africa and beyond Asia up into the Russian steps in Siberia and across the land bridge and then back down

into North America and then eventually South America, they took on like many different forms, but the woolly mammoth is the one you typically think of. But there were elephants at the same time, there were also mammoths and there were other kinds of mammoths besides the woolly mammoth, which I think we did a woolly mammoth episode.

We did do a woolly mammoth episode. All right. If you say so. We did. And they were all over. There was also a type of mammoth or not even a mammoth. It was just a different type of elephant called a gompathyr that was in South America.

And if you look at a gompathyr, I think it was a little bigger than the elephants of today, but it just looks like an elephant. And they used to hunt them down in South America and hunted them to extinction, they think possibly a combination of that and climate change. But you don't think of elephants in the Americas, but there definitely were some here for a very long time.

But climate change can't be real, Josh, because it snowed last week. Right. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, just imagine that it hadn't snowed and we would all know that climate change is real. So there is a, or was rather, a naturalist in the 18th century, France name, and this is a great name.

You want to say it? Actually, you're a French expert. Oh, I wasn't expecting this. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count de Buffon. Was that his title? Is that what that means? Yeah, he's the Count of, well, Buffon. Okay.

Which I'd be like, can I get another Count ship? Instead of Buffon? Mm-hmm. Well, what's wrong with Buffon? It's so-so. It's okay. It's a kind of a garish word. You know what I'm saying?

Sure. Sounds like Buffon. Yeah. And like who wants a Buffon hairdo these days? Nobody. Nobody, except the B-52s. Yep. And maybe that lady from the old,

the, March Simpson? No, what was the name of that steakhouse? The local steakhouse. Oh, outback steaks. No. What's the other one? Longhorn.

Uh-huh. Do you remember the ads of the 90s with the lady with the bouffant? No. The Longhorn steaks? Yeah, you do. I really don't. What was her deal?

She was just like a proto hipster lady. Really? It was, yeah. It was on the Longhorn commercials. Very interesting. Man, now I could go for a steak. Yeah, me too. All right, so where were we?

Oh, right, the 18th century naturalist. He wrote a lot about natural history and he loved the elephant and he was really knocked out by the intelligence of, why is that funny? Just the idea of him being like, man, I am knocked out by the elephant. That is far out, man.

He was knocked out by the brain and the intelligence of the elephant. Right. It approaches near to man and understanding as much at least as matter can approach to mind. Which I understood the first half of it. I think in 18th century speak, that means these dudes are really smart.

Right. And I mean, like he wasn't just, you know, making stuff up here. Like this is, he was onto something because elephants are extremely intelligent from what we can tell. And again, we're just learning more and more about them and as we learn more about them

and start like study the way that they interact with one another and how they interact with us. We're like, well, these are some of the sharpest animals on the planet. Yeah, they have different personalities. Each elephant has its own personality. And you know, you've heard about an elephant not forgetting. They do have a great memory and great recognition ability.

And this story, everyone. I love this story. Is kind of the best thing ever. In 1999, at a sanctuary in Tennessee, there was a resident elephant named Jenny. They introduced a new lady named Shirley, an Asian elephant and they went berserk for one another. They were checking each other out.

They were slapping trunks. They were really animated. They described it as euphoria, bellowing, and then Jenny starts bellowing. And they said that I've never experienced anything that intense without it being aggression. They did say a little digging and it turns out that 23 years earlier, for just a few months,

Jenny and Shirley were in the same circus together. And they saw each other 23 years later and were like, girl, what have you been up to? What I think is cool about that story, in addition to the fact that they remembered each other after 23 years, but that also it says so much about them that they were able to form a bond like that. In just a few months.

In just a few months. I think this is a tremendous amount about elephants and elephant society. What a story. Love it. Yep. So because they have these kind of relationships with one another, they have really complex,

as Ed puts it, very rich societies and families and groups that they live in. Their social networks are very rich and complex, right? Yeah, big time. And one of the ways, I mean, like I didn't realize this, but I came across this in researching this article. Apparently, like if you see like a bunch of deer hanging around or some birds flying together,

they're not like buddies or friends. They don't know one from another typically. Stop. Don't say that. But I mean, I hadn't really thought about that before. I always just assumed. Take it back. I always assumed at least they knew each other by smell

or something like that. But from what I saw, I can't remember where I saw it, but they were saying like it's atypical for animals to recognize one another as individuals. And that elephants definitely do as evidenced by that story. But that kind of lends evidence to the idea that elephants are self-aware, which is a growing awareness among humans

that elephants seem to be self-aware. And one way we test animals to see if they're self-aware is called the mirror test, which is kind of a test that we can improve on it, but it does suggest that the possibility that the animal sees itself as an individual. Yeah, so this was developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970. So I definitely think there's an update that we need here.

We need this 2.0 version, but they did, they test a lot of animals, apes, great apes, dolphins, orcas and magpies have passed this test along with one Asian elephant named Happy. And what they do is they get a mirror, they take the animal and put a red mark and paint this red mark and let's say on their face, something that they can't see without a mirror.

They hold up the mirror and if the animal looks at the mirror and then doesn't like, like if they did this to me, I would throw my poop at the mirror and smash the mirror. But if the animal doesn't do that and they actually touch their own face, then they understand that they're seeing themselves and not some other weird animal across from them. Right, they realize that they're seeing their reflection

and that shows self-awareness. If they laugh at how silly they look, then that really shows self-awareness, maybe even self-consciousness, you know? Yeah, and it takes human children a couple of years to pass this test, we should say. Yes, did you, so there's apparently not all the great apes pass the test that gorillas don't, which is weird,

but they think that possibly gorillas don't because making eye contact in the gorilla world is such an aggressive act that they just don't look at themselves in the mirror enough to see that they have that mark on their face. That's what they think. Yeah, and this doesn't, you know, this isn't, like we said, it's pretty lo-fi.

It's not some, you can't say, this is proof that they are self-aware and sentient, but it's a pretty cool test. It is, plus also, dogs don't pass it, which automatically means that it's a failure of a test because Momo herself proves that all dogs are self-aware and smart and perfect in every way. Yeah, and they also do point out with dogs,

like their best, the way they see the world is through their nose, so maybe this isn't the best test for them. Right. That could do a synth version, maybe. Right. I don't know how you would do it. I've been trying to figure it out for days.

With Momo? Just in my head, but yeah, I'll eventually experiment on Momo. And that, well, there is another test that they use to kind of show self-awareness and the idea of individual identity, and that's through third-party relationships. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

So they, I guess they, it says they accidentally drive a Jeep in between an elephant and her offspring or baby, and the elephant might not notice because she's busy doing something else, but if another elephant trumpets to the mom elephant to say, hey, there's a Jeep between you and your baby, that elephant is indicating that it's aware

that that mom and that baby are related, that they have a relationship that has nothing to do, necessarily, with that third elephant who warned the mom, that's not supposed to exist among non-sentient beings. Right. And by the way, if all this talk about sentience and self-awareness among animals is floating your boat, we did a two-part series on animal rights

that touched on this heavily. Yeah, that's right, because it was a famous case where they were trying to get a personhood in human rights for a chimp, right? Yeah, the non-human rights project, they moved on to elephants, including the elephant happy that passed the mirror test. Right.

And right now, happy's in the Bronx Zoo, and the non-human rights project's position is basically like an elephant's range is like, at least a hundred times what the exhibit that happy lives in is, it's like an acre. Yeah. And their range is so wide that in a single day, happy in Africa would probably walk about a hundred acres,

but happy as an acre, and happy as a sentient being and deserves better. And so they're trying to spring her by making her and by bestowing personhood through the courts. And they actually got a habeas corpus issued, which you only do that for humans. And then the only other time it's happened is with chimps through the non-human rights project.

And it's up in the air. But the judge basically said, hey, you guys need to show whether or not you're unlawfully imprisoning an sentient being, a person basically. Wow. Yeah. So that's where it stands right now.

All right. Well, let's take a break and contemplate that for a couple of hours. And then we'll dust ourself off, come back, and talk a little bit about the difference between male and female elephants, and more about their social component right after this. Let's go.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So this is fun when you talk about the male and female elephants. This whole episode is fun. It is. So males leave when they're young teenagers. They leave earlier than the little ladies do.

They set off on their own. They might move from group to group. They may join up with another family. But by and large, they usually get around and live alone. But they do form groups when they need to. It's not permanent. It could change. And it is a static situation, going between different groups

and different groups of males getting together. But when they do get together, the males, there is a definite hierarchy involved, seniority based on size and age. And that hierarchy is really important to maintain order when it comes to who gets the water first and stuff like that. Right, or which way we're going to walk to go find water

or something like that. There needs to be somebody in charge. But supposedly, when there's plenty of water and everybody's got all the food they need or whatever, that hierarchy can break down pretty easily. But also informally, not like it breaks down in society, just crumbles among this group of males. It breaks down because it's not necessary,

which is kind of neat. And apparently, the groups of males that hang out together are likened to a group of old drinking buddies. They're just rowdy. Yeah, that's kind of funny. Rough housing and all that kind of stuff. Males occasionally will go through something.

It's kind of like being in heat, it sounds like, called must. Well done. M-U-S-T-H, and this is when they just, their testosterone goes through the roof and they are like, I need to mate like yesterday. I got the itch. I got a severe itch and I can't scratch it with my tusk

because they're fixed. Rough housing with my drinking buddies isn't helping. None of that is helping. And when they're going through this must phase, they actually, like all the other male elephants recognize this and say, hey, Freddie have theirs. As you can tell guys, he's really feeling it. So why don't we let him drink first?

And why don't we just kind of go where he wants to go right now? He's leaking a trail of urine everywhere. That's a literal physical warning to the rest of us to stay back. Yeah, and to a little scent for ladies to say, well, well, well, let me follow this trail and see where it goes.

It smells like sex panther. 100% of the time, what is it? It works half the time. Half the time it works 100% of the time. I don't remember, I should know that. We both should chuck. We both just failed spectacularly. Oh, and occasionally, and this is kind of what I've seen

is the only times when elephants really get aggressive with one another, but if it gets pretty extreme and these male elephants, there's a couple of them going through must, they will go at it to get the lady. They will goer each other, and you know, no one wants to talk about that because everyone wants to think elephants are always getting along.

But sometimes when there's a couple of dudes around that are both super revved up, they can get in a fight over a lady. To the death sometimes. Yeah. And I think you kind of said it, but males mostly live on their own and they do form these groups

and they do have friendships and bonds with other males, but they are very frequently found like traveling by themselves, probably to avoid stuff like that. But if you're bummed out by the fact that elephants will kill other elephants to have access to females, you can take heart in that elephants aren't territorial at all.

They don't have territory. And when different groups of elephants, whether it's males and groups of females or different groups of the same sex or whatever, you just have a bunch of different groups of elephants coming together in the same place. They basically have a party, a jamboree. They do, like if it's a body of water

or a place where there's a lot of fruit or some reason for a bunch of elephants who don't know one another get together, it's not only a party, but at that party, you can have like Shirley's in, was it Shirley and Jenny's going, oh my God, I haven't seen you in 12 years. What are you up to?

Is that your little baby? It's the sweetest thing. Yeah, they get really excited when they see old friends. They'll do like pirouettes, pee, poop. Sometimes they pee and poop out of excitement to see one another, which is adorable. Yeah, and as kind of lone wolf as the males can be, the females are really,

this is when you really like get the heart warm going. Heart warm? Heart warm. Not heart warm. It'll give you heart warm thinking about it. This is when it can warm your heart because females, they lived very much in an organized way. They live in family groups.

There are mothers, sometimes three generations all together and their little pups and their aunts and their moms and grandmas. There might be up to 30 of them together with all their kids and they're all led, which is usually the oldest one, but not always, but they're led by a matriarch. And the matriarch is the one that's like,

let's go this way. Not because I just am older and smarter, but I actually have experience that I can remember that will help lead us to safety. Yeah, which is pretty spectacular. It's another thing that's remarkable about elephants is that the matriarchs lead by experience. There was this drought in Tanzania in 1993

and the different herds led by matriarchs that were old enough to remember the last drought back in like 1958 to 1961. The ones that had lived through that before as younger elephants, they remembered how the herds survived. And so their herd was likelier to survive that drought than herds that were led by younger matriarchs that hadn't lived through that previous drought.

So they remember this stuff and they lead their herds based on this past experience and the wisdom that they gained from it. Let's just say it, from wisdom, they lead by wisdom. They do and some matriarchs are very confident. They are very, some are very vigilant though and a little more nervous. It kind of depends on who your matriarch is.

Some are very maternal and when they send the signal for everyone to go, they're like, well, let's wait because Janice's little pup is still bathing. So let's all hang out. Then some of them are more like, no, no, no. Come on, get out of the water. We're going, we're leaving now.

Come on, Janice. I'm going with or without you. Janice is like, what a bummer. And then they're together also for a very practical reason. They help each other out. They babysit for one another, for God's sake. I love that. They babysit for each other, Josh.

I know. They, like the mom can go off and forage for food for pup and know that the pup is being watched by some of her herd members. Her family members is what they're called. That's right. If a matriarch dies, there's a little short time where they're like, all right, who's next?

Who's going to step up? They have ranked choice voting. They kind of do. That's how advanced they are. They're more advanced than every state in the union besides Maine. Besides Maine. A lot of times, like we said,

it's the oldest remaining female, like she would be next up. But sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is the matriarch's daughter. And she will just assume the position of mom, of her mother, as matriarch. Yeah, kind of like she, that like a, oh, what is that called?

Where you like become king or queen because your father or mother was king or queen. Sure. I can't remember what it's called, but- Thank you, birthright? Yeah, basically, that that can, that exists in the elephant society if that elephant happens to be like suited for the job.

And if there's an issue, if there's a dispute where some elephants are like, actually, I don't think she's ready yet. I'm not going to follow her. I'm going to follow Janus. And Janus will be like far out. And that's it, like Janus and the other elephants that want to follow her,

they go off on their own family. There's no battle. There's no fight to the death over dominance. It's just like, all right, we'll see later. And then they may see each other later at that clearing or at that watering hole and be just happy as pie to see one another. And they may also even travel together,

but just at a much greater distance. But within communicating distance to like warn one another and kind of basically keep up the same pace, but they just keep their distance more. Yeah, they'll growl at one another, they'll trumpet, they'll grunt, they will stomp their feet, they will flick their ears, they will use their trunks,

they will angle their heads and tusks and switch their tails. These are all communications. And while they were stomping and while they do have those big sturdy feet, they're also really sensitive. So if an elephant is just standing still, it can feel the vibrations in the ground

of something far away or someone calling them from far away through the ground, through their feet. Like the rumbling through the ground of an elephant growling like miles away. And they also, that trunk, I forgot to mention, they have a really sensitive sense of smell. Supposedly they can smell water up to 12 miles away.

Oh wow. And that's water, that has no smell. Right, they've been shown to smell storms up to like 150 miles away. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Pretty amazing.

I don't know if we've gotten this across or not, but elephants are pretty amazing. We do that with all our animal podcasts. I know. I love it. We should do one about like, I don't know, what's a boring animal that's not so impressive. Let's see, let's see.

They're all great. Yeah, I really can't think of a boring animal. Like there's something fascinating about every animal. Yeah. I was gonna say frogs, but I was like, oh no, frogs turned out to be pretty fascinating. Oh, frogs are the best. No, elephants are the best.

There's this one researcher that firmly believes that elephants have a sense of humor. And she said, she was recalling how they play and they would charge her car and she thought they were tripping and falling and tusk the ground and they kept doing it. And she was like, no, I know what they're doing now.

They're prat-falling. They are pretending to fall in front of the car and having a good time doing it. Yeah, like they pretended they were charging her car in the sanctuary and they'd trip right before it. And it happened enough times that she realized that they were joking. Yeah.

It's amazing. I love it. I do too. What else? Well, this is the saddest thing because everyone knows that elephants mourn. We've all seen the videos and it is true. I think in our grief episode,

I told the story of Domini, the elephant who basically died of a broken heart from grief. Don't retell that story. But they very famously grieve. There will be extended mourning periods for groups of elephants. There are grieving rituals over corpses and they also suffer PTSD if they witness violence.

So if they see a poacher kill and detusk an elephant, they will have literal PTSD and stress symptoms. So one thing I saw, it was like that PTSD is, that it's tough to compare it to human PTSD, but that there are like real pronounced effects on them, usually related to stress, but also apparently related to not having been brought up in their society.

So that when they like, when say like an orphan that survives a culling and is raised like outside of elephant society, it's just not quite right when you compare it to an elephant that was raised by elephants, throughout it's too maturity. And that they frequently call it things like PTSD

or things like that. But it's like, it's almost its own thing. But again, if you did that to a deer or a bird or something, it's not going to have that same effect. It's not, I hate to say it, but it doesn't appear to be smart enough to suffer psychological damage maybe that's good from a traumatic experience.

Yeah, I mean, don't feel sorry for the deer. Deer's probably quite glad. You should still feel sorry for the deer for what we do to deer. No, well, yeah, that's a whole other story about these little things that go in the front of my car that supposedly keep deer away, but I don't know if they work. I've seen them the giant hands that clap

and say, out of the way, deer. I don't even know how this thing works. And it very well may not work at all. But the way I put it to Emily, I was like, unless these actually attract deer, then it's worth like the $5 that it costs. Just give it a shot. Do you remember those hats that had a cord that would clap?

Do you remember that? Sure. My dad had one of those. Did he really? Yeah. Oh man, did he ever have the hat with the two? No. The beers on both sides?

He wasn't quite cool enough for that one. But he was cool enough for the clapping hat. Okay. I think that's the opposite of cool actually. I think so too, the herbal Elvis. So we mentioned before about how to interact with elephants and the only way that we found to interact with elephants ethically is if you go on an ethical safari

and observe them from afar through your binoculars or if you're in the car and you can see them, great. But if you see something that's advertised as an elephant sanctuary. Say something. Yeah, I mean, sanctuary, there's no law that dictates when you can use that word. And when travelers hear that word,

they think, oh, well this means this is where elephants go to be taken care of because it's a sanctuary. I see it's right there on the sign. Right. It's not necessarily what that means. That elephant that you ride or bathe in the pool with may have been headed spirit crushed by being kept in that tiny pen and starved

and beaten for weeks at a time. This founder of the UK group called Action for Elephants UK, Maria Mossman. She basically says, any place that advertises unnatural behavior, just stay away from because elephants shouldn't be doing tricks for humans. And that includes bathing with the elephants, which does sound awesome.

And elephants do bathe and they love to swim and frolic. But the big problem with that is that in a sanctuary where that's how you get the people to come, that means you have to keep the elephant in the water all day and let people climb all over it all day. That's just genuinely unnatural. It's unnatural for a human to ride an elephant. Like you just, it's really easy to step back

once you think in the broad term of unnatural behavior. All of this all of it starts to become quite clear, what you shouldn't shouldn't do with an elephant or participate in with an elephant and instead just let it do its elephant thing and observe it from afar and appreciate it from afar. Yeah, I saw a video the other day though of the black lab that was best friends with an elephant.

I didn't see that one. I don't know the background of this elephant, but this black lab was climbing all over it and jumping off in the water and they looked like they were having a good time. It's unnatural. That dog should be punished for doing that. It was unnatural, but it wasn't a human.

It was a dog. Labs, they're great. They're pretty great too. As far as their threats, obviously all three species are in decline, it's super sad. Their range, which is a great range like you're talking about has been encumbered upon by humans for centuries and thousands of years even.

They just don't have as much room thanks to people and deforestation and fences and roads and oil pipelines and things. Then there's the poaching problem of killing elephants for their tusks and now their skin, that's a new thing. It's just horrific to think about. Yeah, brand new.

As of like 2013, some, I believe, a Chinese entrepreneur said, hey, it'd be cool as if I started a trend for beads jewelry made out of elephant skin. Let me do that. And now all of a sudden the number of elephants that are killed for their skin jumped in Burma just over the border from China

from 10 a year in 2012 to 61 in 2016. And their skin had already been used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure gastritis and ulcers and regrow skin allegedly, which accounts for that 10 in 2012. But apparently the jewelry really caused this jump over the last few years. Yeah, China looks like they have granted licenses

to import at least 35 elephants for skinning over the last couple of years. So that's just awful. It really is. What a great way to end the show. Yeah, and there's, I mean, they're not endangered from what I understand. I think they're listed as vulnerable

by the World Wildlife Foundation, but their numbers have gone down dramatically. In 1930, there were 10 million wild elephants in Africa. There's 415,000 today. Jeez. And just in a decade, I believe in the 2000s, they dropped by 111,000 in just one decade. And in some places, I mean, most of it's poaching.

Some countries still have like, it's legal to trade in ivory. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Eswatini, which you may know and love formally as Swaziland. It's legal to trade in elephant ivory. In the US, the UK, Japan and Thailand, it's legal to trade in antique elephant ivory that was brought into market

before they started, they enacted laws against it. But that's pretty much the biggest threat. And then also, like you said, their habitat encroachment. Like if you build a pipeline, the elephants just don't step over pipelines. They're like, oh, okay, well, our range just got cut in half. And again, their range is enormous. Like an African bush elephant, their home range

is like two, almost 3 million acres. They'll walk hundreds of acres in a single day. So I mean, even keeping one in the zoo, even if you're keeping it alive, even if you keep it alive for a while, like you're really robbing it of its experience. Even in a large sanctuary, you're still robbing it of a lot of its experience too.

It's basically like we need to preserve and sustain their home ranges. It's really the best way to keep them around. Yeah, it's like the whale shark. It's like you're used to the ocean. How about this large pool? Exactly, got a real problem with that. That's another episode we did.

Our zoo's good or bad for animals. Yeah, man, that was a good one. I got one last thing. Which got? So you remember that thing that went around? It was like on Twitter for a while. It was elephants see humans and think we're cute the way that we see puppies and think they're cute.

No, I don't remember that. Oh, it was huge, massive, totally made up. All right, well, I'm glad I didn't see it. All right, yeah. Okay, well, I guess that's it. Thanks for bursting that bubble. I couldn't just let that stand. No, of course not.

So yeah, there's a good Snopes article about that. It's worth checking out. But that doesn't mean that they don't actually think we're cute, it's just never been proven. How about that? If you want to know more about elephants, go learn more about elephants. They're definitely worse things you could do

with your time and since I said that, it's listener mail time. I'm gonna call this a bit of a mea culpa on our Central Park episode when we spoke about Robert Moses. Oh, yeah. I don't remember like saying this guy was the best thing ever or anything,

but there was a darker history there that we did not know about and we'd like to correct that. Yes, we heard from a few people. He said, and this is from Joe Kennedy. He said, if you do some deeper research on Robert Moses, you'll discover the troubling and true effect he had and continues to have on the racial and socioeconomic segregation entrenched in our cities.

I won't flood your email with a book length argument, but many books and papers have been written on the topic. Many of them mentioning Robert Moses specifically. I would ask that you take a deeper dive into this particular character if nothing else and for your own opinions and views of his effect on our country and racial tensions that persist throughout. I've never written into a podcast or a radio show

or website of any kind really, but I thought this is important to point out because it's all too common that people who have committed heinously racist and hateful acts in this history of our country are excused on the basis of being a product of their times, or having done good elsewhere, or whatever other excuse is propped up

to protect their character. And listen guys, I've listened to enough of your shows to know that you are smart guys with broad educated worldviews and seem like you are morally good people, so I'm not suggesting anything other than a little more research on this specific character, just so you know for yourselves. Thanks for the show guys

and your endless hours of entertainment and education. I truly enjoy them. That is Joe Kennedy and we heard from other people, but we appreciate you bringing that to light for sure. Yeah, thanks Joe, appreciate it. And everybody who wrote in to say, he's actually a villain. Yeah.

Yeah, we just, and actually I'd heard about him before, separately I didn't connect the two and realized that that was the same guy. We dropped the ball Chuck. Yeah, we'll try and do better everybody. Okay, well if you want to get in touch with us to tell us how we can do better, we always love to improve, so do that.

Do it nicely, but do it. You can go on to our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links there. I have a website called thejoshclarkway.com, check that out too, and you can send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.