Narrative Ark

Is story-making solely a human thing?

Do other animals make stories?

That question is bouncing around in my head today, sparked by a conversation with elephant expert Joyce Poole. Joyce has devoted her life to researching African savanna elephants — observing them in the wild, advocating for their survival, and creating a fascinating collection of their communication and behavior, called The Elephant Ethogram. I met her in Kenya a few years ago when I was reporting for Threshold, and we talked again this week for some upcoming stories I’m working on.

In our free-ranging conversation about intelligence, communication, and more, we wandered into this question of story-making. Do other species do it? It’s one of those questions that forces you down a path of interlocking concept-defining: what is a story? Can you have a story without language? What is language? Who decides?

I’m interested in those questions, but I’m not going to attempt to answer them here. I’m just savoring the question, because it’s one I hadn’t considered before, at least not directly. Story is fundamental to our species. Human minds are story-making machines; we have stories about our families of origin, our jobs, our partners, the people and parties we vote for, what we eat, what we wear, where we live, our histories, our futures. We make stories about our stories, and then we make more stories about those stories. Human behavior flows directly out of these narratives we absorb, believe, and tell, shaping our individual lives and our societies.

So what about elephants? Or robins? Or that little leech I came upon last week? (Thanks to everyone who chimed in about that!) I think it’s safe to assume that no animals make stories in exactly the same way that we do, and probably not to the same degree. But that doesn’t mean they don’t do it at all. If story-making is a process of making connections between events (OK, I did try to answer one of those definition questions) then surely my dog has some, i.e., “When she opens the closet door and pulls out my leash, we’re going for a walk.”

It’s hard enough to understand the narratives some of our fellow humans operate within; understanding the story-making apparatus of another species may be next to impossible. It’s analogous to and partly a consequence of the fact that we cannot enter another creature’s “Umwelt”¹ — a term coined in the early 1900s by a Baltic German biologist to describe an animal’s specific perceptual reality. But although we might not be able to get all the way inside another animal’s stories, we can still be curious about what those stories might be, how they could be made and shared, and how that shapes their behavior. It’s a shift of position that feels both more respectful and more interesting than assuming that we hold all the narrative reins. Storytelling is powerful. Asking — what’s your story? — is a way of acknowledging that we don’t have, and shouldn’t claim, all that power for ourselves. It nudges us toward recognizing that other animals are authors of their lives, not just characters in our dramas.

If we’re looking for likely candidates for story-making animals, elephants have to be at or near the top of the list. Here’s one of the dozens of behaviors cataloged in Joyce Poole’s Elephant Ethogram (which is just one part of her nonprofit, ElephantVoices. She gave each behavior a name, and this one is called “Adorn-body.” Her description of it is pasted in below.

Adorn-Body: Using the trunk to place or throw vegetation or an object onto the top of the head, neck or back. In some instances such "adornment" may be a consequence of foraging, for instance if an elephant submerges in a swamp and comes up under a clump of vegetation, it may end up lodged on its head or back. In other cases, the adornment is clearly purposeful as the elephant is seen to place the object on its body and work to keep it in position with its ears or trunk, and may replace it if it falls off.

So what’s the story with this goofy little grass-hat? Most importantly, what is the elephant’s story about it — is it about keeping cool, or looking cool? Or something else entirely?

We may never know, but I suspect our own stories are enriched by the asking.

1. Ed Yong does a wonderful job of describing the Umwelt and why it matters in his book, An Immense World, and in this piece in The Atlantic.