Elephants may use medicinal plants to treat themselves and their babies

A sickly looking elephant chews the bark of a tree that’s widely used in traditional medicine. A mother elephant mixes a plant with known medicinal properties with her milk and feeds it to her babies.

These are a few of the stories that researchers have gathered from local wildlife scouts and community members about African elephants in the Mount Elgon region of Kenya.

“I’ve stopped being surprised at this point,” Elodie Freymann, who studies self-medication in the animal kingdom, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. 

“Knowing how intelligent and complex elephants are and elephant societies are, it was just a matter of time, I think, before we began learning just about the extent of the diversity of the medicinal plants that elephants are using in the wild.”

Freymann is the co-author of a new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, that taps into local knowledge to document several dozen medicinal plants used by Mount Elgon elephants. 

The researchers say the study adds to a growing body of evidence that elephants are complex and intelligent creatures, and demonstrates why it’s important to protect the biodiversity they rely on. 

However, scientists caution that more research is needed to say with certainty that the elephants are self-medicating. 

Using local knowledge 

The findings are based on interviews with eight members of the Sabaot community who have lived and worked with the elephants for decades, including wildlife scouts, community guides and village elders.

In some cases, they describe elephants who appear weak, lethargic or stomach sick seeking out specific plants that are used in local medicine. In other cases, they describe mother elephants feeding known medicinal plants to their young.

Of the 35 plants mentioned in the interviews, 34 are used locally in traditional medicine. Eight of the nine most commonly cited plants have been documented in scientific literature as having pharmacological properties. 

“We went to the source. We went to people who have lived amongst these elephant populations for decades and decades,” said Freymann, a post-doctoral fellow at Brown University in Rhode Island.

“I think Western science, for a very long time, hasn’t championed those local voices, and it’s time we start doing that.”

More evidence needed 

Chase LaDue, an elephant ecologist who was not involved in the research, said the study makes a great starting point for further research, but doesn’t prove elephants are intentionally medicating themselves or their young.

“There were no health data showing any of these elephants were actually sick, and nobody measured whether eating these plants changed anything,” LaDue, a curator at the Oklahoma City Zoo and the executive director of the Sri Lanka Elephant Project, said in an email.

“What young calves do all the time is put their trunks into their mothers’ mouths and sample whatever she’s chewing. It’s one of the main ways they learn what to eat. It’s possible something like that is being described here and understood through a medical lens. I’d want to see it before calling it medicine.”

Local knowledge, he says, often points researchers in the right direction. But anecdotal evidence has its limits. 

“If you grew up knowing a plant treats stomach trouble in people, and you see an elephant eat it, it’s natural to connect the two. But elephants eat an enormous variety of plants. In a region this botanically rich, it would be surprising if many of them didn’t have some traditional medicinal use,” he said. “Overlap by itself doesn’t tell us much.”

Freymann says it’s unlikely the elephants are eating medicinal plants simply out of personal preference because they tend to be full of compounds that taste bitter and awful.

“In small doses, they’re medicines, but in high doses, they’re poisons,” she said. “They’re the compounds that the plants generate as a defence against predators, like caterpillars, that are trying to eat them. “

But she agrees this study is just a starting point. Her team has outfitted the interviewees with cameras to document the elephants consuming the plants. She says studying that footage will be the next step in the research.

“We have an incredible, incredible launch pad for conducting further research on this,” she said.

If the researchers are able to prove the elephants are, indeed, self-medicating, they’ll join a growing list of animals who exhibit similar behaviour, including chimpanzees and other great apes, and some insects and birds. 

All the more reason to champion biodiversity, says Freymann.

“Habitat loss doesn’t just mean the loss of foods for animals. It doesn’t mean the loss of territory for animals. It also means the loss for medicine,” she said.

“In this changing world with unstable climatic conditions and changing ecologies, it’s more important than ever that animals have the access to the medicines that they need to flourish in their environment.”