The Better Elephant Birth Initiative is a research project, committed to revealing the secrets to improving the conditions and outcomes of labour, birth and postnatal life for elephant mothers and their calves.
Elephant mothers in captivity are in a crisis, they often have difficult labours, high stillbirth rates and often have difficulties knowing how to take care for their calves.
BEBI aims to dive deep, and explore widely what it is that shapes elephant labours and calf care across captive, semi-captive and wild elephant populations. Elephants, like humans, are an exception among mammals in that birth is not a private affair. The social support received by a labouring female likely plays a crucial role in shaping the progression of a healthy labour. The close, intimate company of older, experienced females—who are mothers or even grandmothers themselves—appears to play a particularly important role in keeping a laboring female calm during labour and in protecting the calf after birth, especially if the mother is in a distressed state. Labour and birth are physiological processes, and stress hormones are known to interfere with the hormones that promote labour progression. Since most obstetric options for assisted delivery are not available to elephants (for example the nature of elephant skin and location of the uterus does not permit cesarian section), all efforts need to be directed towards preventing difficult births from happening in the first place. Of paramount importance to this is assuring a low-stress environment for labouring females.
The Better Elephant Birth Initiative sees the peri-parturient period, and elephant labour and birth specifically, as a key event that has the potential to set a mother-calf dyad on a path of either successful maternal care, or cascading adverse effects of declining health that contributes to the poor survivorship of calfs in captivity. It will explore how factors and features of the peri-parturitional period can influence birth outcomes, maternal and neonatal survival, health, welfare, and future reproductive success. The focus is on understanding how individual factors, unique life experience histories, and environmental and management conditions of parturient females contribute to these outcomes. Stressors during this period, and the positive impact of social support, and in particular the role of older, knowledgeable multiparous females, in buffering against stress, shortening labour, reducing risk of adverse birth outcomes, and improving maternal behaviours and calf survivorship of their group mates are to be a key research focus.
The project will also explore fascinating topics at the forefront of ethology, such as maternal care as learnt rather than instinctual knowledge in more cognitively advanced species, the adaptive significance of allo-maternal care, the role of older females for cultural transmission of knowledge and behaviours in long-lived social species, and how epigenetic influences of/on maternal care can affect the behavioural phenotypes (and potential tendency for pathology or stress-reactive aggression) of successive generations of elephants.
The project will begin, with a post-doctoral research project entitled “Diverse social support of female group mates during the peri-parturitional period as a case study of elephant culture.” and will focus on how aspects of social birth support are transmitted between generations of elephants by social processes, and that there may potentially be variation in the prevalence and nature of birth support behaviours in different elephant populations; owing to historical or ongoing social influences and disturbances (e.g. social isolation for birth, characteristics and histories of parturient females or group matriarchs).
Data extraction and analysis of video footage of historical and ongoing elephant births, along with discussions with breeders and witnesses of elephant birth and calf-rearing, will be used to construct comprehensive ethograms of elephant labour, birth and early maternal and allo-maternal care, and a model illustrating the interactions and relationships between various factors that influence elephant birth outcomes and parturient and neonate health. The ultimate goal is that this model would assist institutions in better managing their individual elephant parturitions and peri-parturient periods, ultimately improving maternal and neonatal outcomes and the overall long-term welfare and reproductive health of captive elephants.