(Gif made from this video at Khao Yai National Park.)
While looking for video clips for last week’s post about standing on two legs being a completely normal behavior for elephants, I also came across another one worth talking about - headstands!
Contrary to the common assumption that “elephants don’t stand on their heads in the wild,” well... to a degree, they actually do! It’s fairly common for wild elephants to be observed getting down on their front ankles and putting a large amount of their weight and balance onto their heads. Calves are the most frequently seen doing the behavior, since through play they practice the skills they’ll need as adults. It takes them a while to figure out how to balance and what on earth to do with their trunks, but that doesn’t discourage them - people who have observed elephants professionally both in the wild and in human care tell me that it’s not unusual to see calves launching themselves with gusto face-first into whatever soft surface is nearby.
(Image from this video in Kruger National Park)
The “headstand” posture is used in a couple of different situations, and doesn’t appear to have an “official” name - every elephant person I’ve talked to tends to refer to it by the role it plays in the situation in which it occurs. So sometimes it’s “tusking” (when it relates to digging into the ground, specifically as part of play or a threat behavior), but sometimes it’s a “head press,” and sometimes it’s a “headstand.”
What do elephants use this “headstand” behavior for?
Wallowing in the mud!
(Image from this video at the Birmingham Zoo)
Pushing or squishing large or heavy objects!
(Images from this video at the Oregon Zoo)
And... oh yeah... killing things.
This is actually how I was originally introduced to elephants doing “head stands” as part of their normal behavioral repertoire - and it’s gruesome. If an elephant wants to hurt you, it can do a number of things: step on you, trunk swat you, gore you... or squish you with their face. By doing a headstand onto you. Elephants have incredibly dense skulls that can bear a lot of strain, so if they really want you (or a lion) dead, they kneel down, rest their forehead on you, and then proceed to lean their entire body weight forward onto you.
While “head pressing” is a common way elephants kill - I’ve had multiple AZA elephant keepers as well as people involved in wild elephant conservation confirm it - it’s not something I was able to find a video of on youtube, and that’s probably for the best. The only record I could find of a human death from elephant head pressing was a zookeeper in the 80′s, but I’ve heard stories of other close calls both in the wild and in human care.
Now, if you’ve looked at all those videos, you’ll have noticed that there’s one major difference between these elephant “headstands” and the true headstands you might see elephants do at a circus - only the babies are lifting their feet off the ground (generally before promptly falling over). Does this mean that the headstands performing elephants are doing are different in a way that injurious? Not necessarily! Animals practice behaviors they have reasons to continue repeating - and things like lifting up the back feet for a headstand take both balance and specific muscle strength. If you look back at the post about elephants walking on two legs while foraging, compare the duration of the adult bull’s stand to the one done by the young calf; the adult has much better balance and the correct musculature to support his stance, whereas the little guy has a lot of practicing to do before he can sustain the same sort of pose. Both these elephants will practice two-legged stands throughout their life because it is a behavior that is reinforced by their environment (it helps them reach tasty things).
When it comes to headstands, lifting their back legs off the ground isn’t going to be beneficial to most elephants - in fact, a full-grown adult elephant falling over the way the rubbery calves do during practice could really do damage - so wild elephants eventually learn to do a version of the “headstand” behavior that leaves their feet on the ground and builds the correct musculature for shoving and squishing in that position, rather than using their energy too learn a vertical balancing behavior that they’re not going to ever need to use. But that doesn’t mean that elephant can’t be taught to build the musculature or develop the balance for a true headstand - it just means they need to start learning it young, when they still bounce without damage if they lose their balance. It’s done by capturing a calf’s spontaneous headstand practice and putting it on cue, and then a) using a target to encourage the back feet to leave the ground and b) encouraging increases in duration of the stand, as the elephant develop the muscle strength to do so.
Training elephants to do “trick” behaviors is a super controversial topic, so I want to be clear here: my goal is not to convince you that elephants “should” be taught to do headstands, but teach people that wild elephants have a very similar natural behavior that they use throughout their lives. However, it is also important to me to clarify that it is possible to teach true headstand behaviors elephants in human care - and maintain them - entirely with positive training methods, despite what certain activist groups would have people believe.
I’ve embedded two videos below from AZA zoos whose elephants do true headstands on cue in entirely protected-contact management situations - the trainers cuing the behavior, in both videos, are separated from the trainers by both a barrier and at least ten feet of distance. (In the second video, the trainers are separated from the elephant by an underwater wall that prevents the animals from exiting the pool at that location.) The videos were taken in the fall of 2014 and summer of 2017, respectively. AZA required all member facilities to have switched over to “protected contact” management (where trainers do not share unrestricted space with an animal at any time, and a style of elephant care which necessitates the use of positive reinforcement training) at the beginning of 2014, so if the headstand behavior was truly aversive to the animals performing it, it would have had plenty of time to extinguish by the filming of the first video, and certainly would have by the time the second one was taken three years later. As I detailed in an post looking at animal training through the lens of systems theory, it’s very hard to get an animal to work against it’s own internal interests (it requires a lot of very strong motivating stimulus); so if these headstands were truly aversive to the specific elephant in their specific situation, no bucket of treats would be motivating enough to counteract the elephant’s desire to not to the behavior - and especially not for the behavior to have sustained for so many years.
2014 - Hogle Zoo
2017 - Oregon Zoo
At the end of the day, the ethics of training elephants to do behaviors like true headstands is something hotly debated - but the fact that they do very similar things as part of their natural behavioral repertoire is something that should not be.
