In this column Cecil talks about teaching an elephant thins that it will remember. But I always thought that the expression “An elephant never forgets” was based on the fact that elephants have generational emory. That is, if an elephants parent knew where a watering hole was, the elephant itself could find that hole without ever having seen it. Am I totally off here? I found only one website that said anything about it, and it seems the authors of that website believed in memes. Anyone?
I’ve never understood it to mean that, but I could be wrong. I always thought it was one of those expressions people use when marveling at the amazing powers of animals – “An elephant never forgets”, “Cats always land on their feet”, etc. If it was a comment on generational memory in elephants, then I’d think the phrase would be “Elephants [plural] never forget,” and that’s not the way I’ve generally heard it.
Also, it seems like generational memory in elephants is not something that people would notice without having conducted extensive studies on elephants. If you saw a young elephant at a watering hole, how would you know it hadn’t previously been there with its parents? You’d have to have followed the elephant for its whole life. And even then, it would be difficult to determine whether it found the watering hole by chance or whether it had been passed information from its parents. While such studies may have been conducted, I’m guessing they’re probably more recent than the origin of the phrase.
But as I said, I could be totally wrong. For some reason, the properties of elephants don’t aren’t a topic that comes up very often in my daily conversations.
This sounds totally unlikely.
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Elephants travel in herds, so a young elephant would not be wandering around by itself looking for a watering hole.
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Young elephants stay close to their mother/family group for the first year or 2 of their life; by then they would have traveled to each watering hole in their territory at least a few times.
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And even if somehow a young elephant was wandering around alone looking for a watering hole, any elephant could smell a watering hole a long way off, and thus find it (without ever having seen it before). This seems a much more likely explanation than some mythical ‘generational memory’.
OK, sounds good. Like I said, it’s what I always thought, not what I am maintaining is true. I was told this a long time ago, and I thought I remember it being from a reliable source. (Maybe my grandfather knew it…) Anyway, it does seem illogical, at least based on the explanation that I remember.