The astonishing proof that elephants grieve as deeply as we do, revealed by scientists after an extraordinary action by a mourning herd is seen for the first time…

To Clint Eastwood, the bull elephant Abu was a natural in front of the cameras, a born pro. The Hollywood star-turned-director called him ‘one-take Abu’.

Rescued from a wildlife park in Texas and given a new life in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, the giant tusker appeared in Eastwood’s acclaimed 1990 movie White Hunter Black Heart plus a succession of films and TV shows, as well as an IBM advert.

But to a three-year-old orphan elephant named Mafunyane, Abu played a different role. He was a father figure to the youngster, who followed him everywhere and copied whatever he did.

When Abu died in 2002, Mafunyane was grief-stricken. For days he stood vigil over the body, keeping hyenas at bay. Other elephants came to pay their respects to Abu – one, an older female named Cathy, stood with the temporal glands at the sides of her head streaming liquid. Just as humans cry tears, this is the elephant way of showing intense emotion.

Even now, two decades on, Mafunyane always pauses when he passes the entrance to Seba Camp at the safari centre where Abu’s skull is displayed. Rangers there have no doubt that he recognises the remains of his friend and mentor.

It might seem fanciful to suggest that elephants mourn dead loved ones, but a wealth of evidence is emerging that they and other animals – including primates and whales – feel loss as keenly as humans. And, like us, they use rituals to come to terms with their grief.

Foresters and tea workers in northern India have long claimed that the elephants there bury their dead, in fabled elephant graveyards.

Now a team from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune has published findings that seem to confirm these stories.

In an irrigation ditch on a tea plantation in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, the body of a one-year-old calf was discovered in 2022, upside-down and almost completely buried.

This might have been the result of an accident, but during the past 18 months another four dead elephant calves have been found, buried in ditches. All had marks on their hides that indicated they had been dragged some distance after death.

Report authors Parveen Kaswan and Dr Akashdeep Roy said they believe this indicates deliberate burial, though they emphasise that the behaviour has not been observed at first-hand.

All the juvenile elephants were dead before being placed into their graves.

It is possible, but unlikely, the scientists say, that the ditches then collapsed because of the weight of the herd around them.

But elephants in Africa have been observed covering their dead with branches and leaves, known as a ‘weak burial’.

Veteran wildlife film-maker James Honeyborne said: ‘We may never know exactly what goes on inside the mind of an elephant, but it would be arrogant to assume that we are the only species capable of feeling loss and grief.’

In 2013 he produced Sir David Attenborough’s Africa series, which caused a sensation with a sequence of a mother and her starving calf during a drought. Cameraman Mark Deeble followed the pair for days. Even after the calf died, the distraught female continued trying to lift it up and move it with her feet.

Finally she seemed to understand there was nothing more she could do. But instead of walking away in search of the food she needed desperately, she simply stood for a long time over the body, as though paying respects.

Elephant bonds can equal in intensity anything known in the human world, and to break these bonds can be fatal.

Dame Daphne Sheldrick runs a sanctuary in Kenya where baby elephants orphaned by poachers are hand-reared and returned to the wild. One of her earliest cases was brought in at only a few days old. Dame Daphne devoted herself to the calf, barely leaving its side during the first six months and feeding it on gallons of human formula milk (elephant calves can’t digest cow’s milk).

But eventually she had to leave another carer in charge for a week, to attend her daughter’s wedding – and when she returned, was devastated to discover the baby had died. It had pined for her before collapsing, dead of a broken heart.

‘I made the mistake of thinking another human could take my place,’ said Dame Daphne.

‘Now, to avoid them getting too attached to any individual, all the keepers at the Sheldrick Trust sleep on rotation alongside every elephant in the nursery.’

It is not only elephants who experience such emotions.

At a 2022 funeral at Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, grieving relatives were moved to see a grey langur monkey sit by the coffin. Taking the arm of the dead man, it lifted his hand and let it drop. Then it leant forward and nuzzled his cheek, seeming to give him a kiss of mourning and farewell.

The man’s name was Peethambaram Rajan, a gentle 56-year-old known for his kindness to animals, and this monkey was a favourite of his.

Monkeys do react to death in very human ways. A study in 2021 for the Royal Society, looking at more than 400 reported cases involving 50 primate species, found that female monkeys and apes will mourn dead babies for days, cradling the corpse and carrying it everywhere.

Chimp society is so complex that researchers are constantly reporting new behaviour. One group in Guinea built a cairn of rocks at the foot of a tree. ‘Maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine,’ said PhD student Laura Kehoe from Berlin.

Much of the best evidence comes from wildlife documentaries.

In 2019, film-maker John Downer and his team built one of their trademark ‘spy creatures’ – a robotic baby langur with a camera in one eyeball for their Spy In The Wild series. The mechanical monkey was left at a temple in Rajasthan, India, to be found by a resident troupe of langurs. One of the young females picked it up to play with it – and then dropped it from a height.

As the doll lay motionless, the adults gathered round. It was plain they thought the ‘baby’ was dead. Gradually they began to hug and comfort one another, like mourners at a funeral. Parents reached for their children and folded them in their arms.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of their ‘humanity’ comes from a gorilla named Koko, who lived in captivity in California with researcher Dr Francine ‘Penny’ Patterson for 40-plus years.

Koko learned American sign language, with a vocabulary of 1,000 words or more, and was capable of holding conversations with Dr Patterson. In 1985, Koko was given a kitten, a grey Manx that she named All Ball. She adored it, cuddling it and grooming it constantly.

When All Ball was run over and killed, Koko was bereft.

She reacted with horror when Dr Patterson broke the news, wailing a drawn-out moan that is the gorilla’s equivalent of sobbing. Repeatedly she signed the words ‘sad’, ‘bad’ and ‘frown’.

Later, Dr Patterson asked Koko if she knew what death meant. The gorilla replied: ‘Trouble old… comfortable hole bye… sleep.’

That strongly implies the idea of a physical burial is instinctive, hard-wired into primate brains.

Dame Daphne, who was widowed nearly 50 years ago, says she has learned from animals how to cope with grief.

She draws strength from the courage of her elephants ‘and how they can turn a page, weep and grieve and mourn, and then concentrate on the living’. That’s a lesson for every human heart.