Elephant

Ganesha is among the most widely worshipped deities in India and is invoked at the beginning of undertakings, journeys, business ventures and texts, the remover of obstacles, and in some framings their placer as well. He is worshipped across sectarian lines, by Shaivas, Vaishnavas and others, and outside India in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Java, Bali and Japan, where he appears as Kangiten. The stories of how he acquired the elephant head vary, the best-known being that Shiva beheaded him without recognising him and replaced the head with the first available. Ganesha's presence in the archaeological and textual record becomes prominent from about the fourth or fifth century CE, which makes him a relatively late arrival among major deities.

Airavata is the white elephant mount of Indra, produced at the churning of the ocean, and the ancestor of all elephants in some accounts.

Buddhism. Queen Maya dreams of a white elephant entering her right side before the birth of the Buddha, an episode depicted from the earliest Buddhist narrative art at Bharhut and Sanchi. The elephant also appears as the mind in the Tibetan taming-the-elephant diagrams, where its colour lightens as meditation progresses.

White elephants are royal property in Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia, possession of them indicating the legitimacy and merit of a ruler; they are rare albino or pale animals identified by specific criteria. The English phrase for a burdensome useless gift derives from the story that a Burmese or Siamese king would present one to a courtier he wished to ruin, since the animal could not be worked or disposed of and had to be maintained. The story is repeated everywhere and is not well attested in Southeast Asian sources; treat the phrase as real and its origin story as folklore.

The natural history is unusual enough that it deserves stating without embellishment, because the embellishments are the part that gets challenged.

Communication. Elephants produce infrasonic calls below about 20 hertz, at the edge of or beneath human hearing, which travel several kilometres through air and further through the ground. They detect these partly through the feet and trunk, sensing seismic vibration. Katy Payne's identification of elephant infrasound in 1984 opened a substantial research field, and coordination between separated groups is now well documented.

The trunk contains no bone and an estimated forty thousand muscle fascicles, and functions as nose, hand, hose, snorkel and weapon. African elephants have two opposing fingers at the tip and Asian elephants one.

Death. Elephants show repeated, sustained and specific attention to the remains of their own species, investigating bones and tusks with trunk and feet, returning to them, and reacting differently to elephant bones than to those of other animals. This is well documented in the field. What is not documented, despite constant repetition, is the elephants' graveyard: there is no place elephants go to die, and the concentrations of bones that gave rise to the story are explained by drought deaths at water sources and by ivory hunting.

Memory and cognition. Long-lived matriarchs retain knowledge of distant water sources used only in severe drought, and groups led by older matriarchs survive drought better, a finding from Amboseli. Asian elephants have passed mirror self-recognition tests. The proverb about never forgetting is closer to true than most proverbs about animals, which is worth conceding rather than dismissing.