Celebrating Echo’s the elephant’s life

If you have never heard of Echo, then you must know very little about elephants. Echo the Matriarch elephant perhaps the most famous of elephants that have ever lived in Kenya’s Amboseli has died.

She has been the leader of her family for over 36 years and through all of the research, books and media attention that has focused on her, she has become an icon for elephants.

One of the oldest metrach having survived the slaughter of her kind in the 80’s and early 90’s that saw Kenya’s elephant population reduced from 167,000 individuals elephants to about 16,000 through poaching.

Amboseli’s elephants are perhaps the most studied and of the 1,500 elephants in the park each is known by name.

Echo has be like family to the researchers who have lived and worked with her.

At the age of 64 echo has become more than just an animal.

Our thoughts are with Echo’s family - as this will be a disturbing time for them - with Cynthia, Soila, Norah, Katito and Robert in Amboseli, who have kept up with Echo’s daily life for so many years. All of us who knew Echo have been touched by her gentleness and wisdom, and many of us have sought solace in her presence during difficult times.

Elephants do grieve their loved ones and it is evident that she will be missed.One of the most moving displays of elephant emotion is the grieving process. Elephants remember and mourn loved ones, even many years after their death. When an elephant walks past a place that a loved one died he or she will stop and take a silent pause that can last several minutes.

While standing over the remains, the elephant may touch the bones of the dead elephant (not the bones of any other species), smelling them, turning them over and caressing the bones with their trunk. Researchers don’t quite understand the reason for this behavior. They guess the elephants could be grieving. Or they could they be reliving memories. Or perhaps the elephant is trying to recognize the deceased. Whatever the reason, researchers suspect that the sheer interest in the dead elephant is evidence that elephants have a concept of death.

In UNFORGETTABLE ELEPHANTS, when Erin is wounded, Echo and the family never wander far from her over the course of several days, leaving only to drink. After Erin’s death, her family touched and smelled the bones, as filmmaker Martyn Colbeck says, “as if they were trying to understand what had happened.”

Because of lack of leadership her death her family has already split into 6 groups.