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BELLOWING pitifully, the baby elephant sounds terrified. She and her mother, Ma Shwe, have been wading in the upper Taungdwin River, in what is now Myanmar, in Southeast Asia, when they are caught in a flash flood. Ma Shwe's feet still touch the ground, so she tries to clamp her baby to her side with her trunk. But the swirling water sweeps her calf away!
Lunging after her, Ma Shwe gets her baby back but has trouble holding her. Using all her strength, this work elephant, who usually hauls logs, now does something extraordinary. She lifts her baby up with her trunk, rears up on her hind legs, and sets the baby on a rocky ledge. Then Ma Shwe falls back and is washed away.
Jim Williams, who manages the elephant camp, is unable to save Ma Shwe. He is trying to figure out how to rescue her calf. Suddenly, he says, "I heard the grandest sounds of a mother's love I could remember." Ma Shwe has escaped the torrent and is thrashing through the forest, trumpeting to her baby. "Don't worry. I'm coming," she seems to say. By morning, mother and babe are together again on dry land.
This mama elephant loves her daughter a lot, right? Not everyone agrees. "Love is almost impossible to prove," says Victoria Horner, animal behaviorist at Emory University,
in Atlanta, Georgia.
First of all, love means something different to everyone, making it hard to define. Second, there are many types of love, including the kind between parents and children, among siblings, and with couples. But the biggest problem is that animals can't tell us how they feel, and scientists can't set up experiments to find out. All we have to go by is our interpretation of an animal's facial expressions, vocalizations, body language, and behavior.
Here are seven more stories that suggest that some animals may be capable of loving each other. You be the judge.
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