Do elephants really have hidden graveyards?

In the new version of "The Lion King" released three years ago, the hyenas tricked Simba into going to see the elephant cemetery, and ended up tricking him into a hyena cave. But before that, he did see the bones of an elephant. According to legend, the elephant cemetery is a special hidden place. Whenever an elephant feels too old, it will walk to this cemetery by itself, and then die without eating or drinking water.

But legends are legends, and reality is reality. Elephants don't actually have any hidden cemeteries, nor do they specifically look for a place to die. We can be sure of this conclusion because scientists have carefully tracked many elephant groups. If there were cemeteries, they would have been discovered by humans.

The origin of the legend of the elephant graveyard may be a misunderstanding of some real behaviors of elephants. It can be roughly summarized as follows:

First, the truth is: when elephants encounter drought, they will gather in places with food and water; if the disaster is serious, some old elephants may die here. Later people may mistake this place as a special cemetery for elephants. However, they come here for food and water, not to starve to death.

Second, paleontologists have dug up many ancient elephant bones concentrated in one place, and laymen may mistake it for a cemetery. But in fact, many of these bones are swamps, and the elephants got stuck and couldn't get out, and then died here, not that they deliberately looked for a cemetery to die. In another example, all the elephants' tusks were gone, indicating that this was probably a hunter who killed a large group of elephants and took away the tusks.

Third, although elephants do not have a fixed cemetery, if they encounter the bones of other elephants, they will stretch out their trunks to touch them to express their condolences. Maybe someone saw this scene and remembered that humans also go to graves to express condolences, so they imagined this place as an elephant cemetery.

As for what some people say about elephants trampling their dying companions to death, this is even further from the truth.

Elephants are the largest mammals on land, so many stories will mystify them or make excessive analogies with humans. Most of the behaviors of elephants are very different from humans, but there is one thing that is very similar to humans, that is, they care about their families very much. Baby elephants need to be cared for by their parents and relatives to grow up healthily, and they will be very sad if their relatives die. Some bad people will kill adult elephants in order to seize their ivory, which not only takes their lives, but also the baby elephants they take care of will suffer.

In 2016, the General Office of the State Council of my country issued the "Notice on Orderly Stopping the Commercial Processing and Sales of Ivory and Ivory Products", which confirmed that the commercial processing and sales of ivory and ivory products will be stopped in batches before December 31, 2017. Today, many people around the world are working hard to combat elephant poaching and ivory smuggling. Here, I would like to appeal to everyone to protect elephants and not buy ivory products.