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When elephant moms need help, nannies step in
Tina Deines
Fri, May 9, 2025 at 7:11 AM PDT
4 min read
In December 2023, a 10-year-old African elephant disappeared from her herd in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve. When she returned a month later, she was accompanied by two unrelated females, thought to be about 10 and 15 years old; the younger one had a newborn calf in tow.
What happened next was remarkable, according to Giacomo D’Ammando, research manager for the Kenya-based conservation organization Save the Elephants.
“[The recently returned elephant] had stepped into a caregiver role, helping the inexperienced young mother raise her calf, like a nanny,” D’Ammando says.
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While an exceptional story, allomothers—female elephants that help take care of calves that are not their own—have always been around. They play an important role in elephant society by comforting and teaching babies while giving mom a hand.
“They’re essentially nannies and they’re all over elephant society,” says Shifra Goldenberg, a population sustainability scientist for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, who has studied wild elephants in Kenya.
Sometimes older females like grandmothers and aunts fill this role, “but more commonly, you get this sort of younger age set…who are really attracted to babies, really want to spend time with them and take care of them, and it provides quite a lot of benefits,” she says. Most nannies are less than 15 years old and have never given birth, D’Ammando notes.
Younger allomothers get vital parenting experience as they interact with their adopted calves, Goldenberg explains. Plus, moms get extra eyes on their young one. Since elephants tend to spread out to search for food, “that helps to have more legs and trunks surrounding your baby,” she adds.
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According to D’Ammando, elephant nannies spend a lot of time greeting and touching the baby.
They also comfort distressed calves, often “touching them all over” with their trunk, according to Goldenberg. D’Ammando says nannies step in to assist in a variety of stressful situations—for instance, if a very young calf falls and cannot walk properly, or if they get stuck in the mud or panic after being separated from their mother.
In high-stress situations, all of the group’s females will engage in a group defense, D’Ammando adds.
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For example, in April, a viral video showed a 5.2-magnitude earthquake at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California. Three of the park’s older female elephants scrambled to form a protective circle around two 6-year-old calves. The actions in this video are a great example of herd dynamics in general, Mindy Albright, the facility’s curator of mammals, says.
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“Survival strategy is key, right?” she says. “And so anytime there’s any kind of signs of danger, you’ll see the herd congregate together and often creating these alert circles where the calves are in the center so that they can be more protected.”
However, Goldenberg says that the “nanny” elephant’s allomothering instincts also came out during the quake. When one of the young elephants first remained on the outside of the circle, his nanny repeatedly tapped him on the back and face as if to encourage him back in.
According to Goldenberg, the relationship between nanny and baby includes a lot of play, which helps calves build confidence to eventually become independent from mom, a years-long process that’s different for each elephant, though many are nutritionally independent around 4 years of age. Females ultimately stay with their natal group, while males gradually disperse around age 14.
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Elephants also participate in “allosuckling,” with calves nursing from young females for comfort rather than nutrition.
“The allomothers will often sample trying to let the calf nurse from them even though they’re not necessarily lactating,” Albright says of the Safari Park’s herd. “So, you see them practice. They’ll even use their trunk to try to guide them to their nipple, kind of trying to share with them, ‘I can comfort you too, and I’m a resource for that.’”
Staff at the Safari Park have also witnessed impromptu sleepovers when tired calves wander over to the allomothers while their mom is foraging.
“They’ll go cuddle with them and sleep in these big giant piles of juveniles all taking care of the babies while the moms can still go and forage throughout the night,” Albright says. “They’re really cute.”
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Forget Strays, the Government Must First Keep its Human Citizens Safe
Around 20 per cent of the victims of stray animal bites are children, and they account for 30-60 per cent of deaths
Photo for illustration
Updated on:
10 May 2025, 5:30 pm
4 min read
- https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/columns/2025/May/11/forget-strays-the-government-must-first-keep-its-human-citizens-safe
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Three children have died in Kerala in the last month from rabies. All of them had taken anti-rabies vaccination, yet that didn’t prevent their young lives from being snuffed out cruelly by the dreaded infection. India has 36 per cent of all rabies death cases in the world. India witnessed 22 lakh dog bite cases and over 5 lakh other animal bite cases, including monkey bite cases, and rabies claims an annual average of 21,000 deaths in India.
Around 20 per cent of the victims of stray animal bites are children, and they account for 30-60 per cent of deaths. The statistics paint a grim picture of vulnerability, particularly in rural areas with scarce medical facilities. Indian roads are free for all, a chaotic ecosystem where humans and animals compete for space. Cows, dogs, monkeys, goats, buffaloes, and many other stray animals roam around our streets, blocking traffic and causing many unreported accidents. These animals, often malnourished and territorial, create hazards not just through confrontation but also by causing vehicles to swerve suddenly or brake without warning. Rabies is just one of the problems in a long list of public health and safety concerns that plague India’s streets, where zoonotic diseases and traffic accidents intertwine to form a dangerous cocktail of death and accidents.
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The stray dog problem is directly linked to our civic sense and how our local bodies handle waste. The food trash that litters most of our cities is a breeding ground for street dogs. They grow and multiply rapidly around these makeshift food sources, establishing territories near dumpsters and restaurant back alleys. Municipal workers, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of garbage, often leave piles uncollected for days, creating perfect scavenging spots for packs of dogs. These areas become their hunting grounds, where they teach their pups to survive on discarded scraps and rotting refuse, perpetuating a cycle that has existed for generations.
Some irresponsible citizens feed street dogs and allow them to multiply, ignoring the perils they cause to the general public. These well-meaning but misguided individuals often leave food in plastic bags or paper plates at street corners, creating informal feeding stations that draw more and more strays to residential areas. Adopting a street dog and taking care of it throughout its life is undoubtedly an act of great compassion, but throwing a few biscuits or leftover food for street dogs and leaving them to multiply is sheer irresponsibility. Such casual feeding practices give these animals just enough sustenance to survive and breed, while doing nothing to address their need for proper medical care, vaccinations, or population control, ultimately contributing to the growing crisis on city streets.
India has an estimated 6.2 crore street dogs, or four dogs per hundred people. The number of other street animals, wild or feral, remains largely uncounted—a statistic lost in the vastness of the subcontinent. It is estimated that around 50 lakh stray cows are wandering the dusty roads and urban centres of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh alone. The effectiveness of sterilisation programmes has proven woefully limited, their reach extending to only a fraction of the burgeoning animal population. Though courts and governments have consistently favoured non-lethal measures like sheltering or sterilisation— often championing compassion over pragmatism—the problem has only been exacerbated over the years, growing more intractable with each passing season. The courts and animal rights activists have frequently and passionately intervened whenever culling of street dogs has been discussed, effectively preventing such measures through legal challenges and public outcry, but it seems that no one is prepared to shoulder the moral responsibility for the deaths of innocent people mauled in unprovoked attacks.
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The ban on cow slaughter has made it financially unviable for farmers to keep non-productive cattle, leading to widespread abandonment across both rural and urban areas, and the stray cow population is going to explode in the coming years, potentially reaching crisis levels in major cities and agricultural zones. One pragmatic solution, though partial and riddled with ethical and practical issues and likely to face resistance from religious groups and animal welfare advocates, is to use the street animals as fodder for carnivorous animals in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries, thus aiding the natural food cycle while simultaneously addressing two pressing issues. This approach would help manage the burgeoning stray population and reduce the significant costs zoos incur in feeding their predator species. Often, it becomes a moral dilemma in choosing the life of one species over another, with advocates on both sides passionately defending their positions while struggling to find common ground. But when no one is shedding a drop of tear for millions of chickens, goats, buffaloes, pigs, fish and other animals that daily meet their end in processing facilities worldwide, why should a false sense of compassion prevent us from culling street dogs or cows that pose a threat to human life? The selective nature of such moral outrage, applied inconsistently across species, reveals the complex and often contradictory relationship humans maintain with different animals, shaped more by cultural conditioning than rational assessment of harm and benefit. The fundamental duty of a government must first be towards the safety and wellbeing of its human citizens, rather than to the street dogs or cows, however sympathetic their plight might be.
