Katijah Rahmat: A lot of elephant scientists that I talk to, I can’t speak for all of them, but the ones that have generously shared with me their frustration wish they could say much more about the elephant lives that they witness. But they hold back a little bit because of the rigors of what science demands. And I completely understand that. But I’m always fascinated by that frustration and how much, I think, just granting them this temporal experience can liberate so much. Again, I think a lot of these uncharted territories can be given a language slowly if we develop and take this phenomenon very seriously.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Katijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She studies animal temporality, the ability to experience time, specifically in the elephant. Her thesis details three areas through which we may begin to understand how elephants experience time. These include individual elephant histories, or the ability for the elephant to imagine its own future and remember the past, and eco-cultural identity, which includes historical, geographical and social dynamics that shape an elephant’s inheritance of knowledge. And then there is, of course, human-impacted time, which includes how elephants negotiate with and resist human-imposed time. All this may sound quite subjective, and Rahmat is the first to point this out. Still, as she explains, the effects of elephant temporality are quite real and show up in their behavior towards each other, towards humans, and towards the landscape. Developing a language to understand how elephants experience time, Rahmat says, may help us unlock new ways of understanding them and perhaps protecting them. Katijah Rahmat, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It is great to have you with us.

Katijah: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Can you describe why you started studying temporality, which is the experience of time among animals, and specifically the elephant?

Katijah: Yeah. When I started my thesis, it was initially a history thesis, and I wanted to understand why Malaya had a rich elephant tradition, but its modern memory didn’t seem to leave any traces at all. There was a sort of amnesia in the country about this huge population and tradition of elephants that used to be there. But when I started my thesis, the pandemic hit, and it was a very temporally disruptive time in my life. I was also grieving my father, which is also a sort of temporal disruption, right, because I was wanting to go back to the past, and I was also trying to build this new relationship based on the past memories of my father. And the pandemic had frozen us in time. So I got lost in time literature, and time can be a comfort because there are all these theories about how maybe in another timeline my father is still alive and things like that. I was appreciating how much time is really this map of how to situate yourself. And of course I still had my elephant thesis to do, and it made me start thinking about how there’s very little literature on the relationship between time and animals outside the biological relationship. And I thought this is such a lost or overlooked element because it does very much situate animals just as it situates us. So I just got lost and fascinated with that question.

Mike: It is a really interesting question. Why is studying it so important, do you think? You mentioned to me, I think in an email, that your aim is to encourage a more dynamic view of their place in the world when we recognize elephants equally as temporal beings. So can you elaborate on that?

Katijah: Yeah. I think the number one thing I would emphasize is that time has this power to illuminate in our life, and it should be the same for animals as well. And when I say illuminate, we can think about the mind, for example, as something richly temporal. You can’t really talk about mental activity without thinking of it as dynamic and in flux. So for example, when we talk about intelligence, we don’t think about intelligence as fixed or repetitive responses. We think of something that has learned from the past and is dynamically responding in unique ways to unique circumstances. So there’s this fluidity to how we think about the mind, and I think time is very good at describing that. It can help talk about personality. There’s no way you can think about personality in a static way. You have to think about personality as an accumulation of history, certain responses to history. And it’s also underpinning how we think about the depth of feeling. Like when we consider the possibility of an elephant mourning, for example, that means we understand that at some level they remember and they register this as a loss because they remember. And these are all radical. They sound quite commonplace for human experience. Of course we all know this when we talk to each other about it. Oh, I’m really sad because I miss my dad, and so on and so forth. But I think it’s radical because for people who are unfamiliar with animals, or who feel that animals are limited or reactionary or just stay in a static place, it radically challenges that in so many implied ways, but also in the way we think and register what they’re doing with their behaviors.

Mike: And so I know that you’ve mentioned that your thesis is a bit, it was written a while ago now, but how do elephants experience time? Because you’ve written about this and you mentioned there are three key areas from which we can understand how they experience time. And the first one you describe as elephant eco-cultural identity. So what exactly is that? Because that is a really interesting concept. What are some examples of that in the elephant’s world?

Katijah: Yeah. So this was early on in my research and I wanted to find a way of evidencing all these different strands of the temporal in elephant lives. And so I started compartmentalizing them in the ways that we could easily recognize them. So definitely life history is one in terms of how they receive trauma and so on. But eco-cultural identity was a term I thought was useful because I just wanted a way of saying that animals are not just a product of their biology. They’re not just a product of their ecology. They’re also cultural constructs. They’re also susceptible to cultural constructs, whether it’s the culture that they exercise or human cultures. They’re also porous to that. And all these have temporal strands. And I think now that I’ve finished my research, at least at the thesis level, I accept that and I believe that most temporal relationships are just complex and layered and interrelated, that we don’t really need these divisions anymore. I think they’re all deeply intertwined. But they all testify to the temporal richness of the elephant. And I would just want to add that while I talk about experience of time for elephants, I can’t claim to ever subjectively know how they experience time. There are definitely some very interesting scientific research studies that try to measure how well different animals track change and so on. But I think even the most conservative philosopher and scientist would say we can’t ever know how they experience time. But we can see evidence of their experience of time in these many ways that we’ve just mentioned.

Mike: Yeah. One of those ways, I think, is how you mentioned that their survival is specifically reliant on the stored knowledge of matriarchs, which I find just very fascinating. And I would love for you to talk about how elephants rely on that knowledge. How is it passed down?

Katijah: They’re deeply social creatures, and there’s a lot of beautifully written, rich studies on the subject of the oldest, typically the largest of the herd, being the storehouse of knowledge. She typically is the one who would remember decades-old water sources in a drought, for example. They would remember other herds, and so they would know the politics of different herd relationships. And they therefore steer the herd to where they need to go. So yeah, they’re the repositories of memory for the herd.

Mike: That is really cool. Can you describe, offhand, can you describe some case studies or evidence that shows that?

Katijah: Probably the most famous one that describes what’s lost, or the consequences of it, is from this author and scientist Gay Bradshaw. And she was doing a study about elephant trauma. She was basically arguing that elephants are so cognitively sophisticated and intelligent, and emotionally intelligent and deeply social, that when the herd, or when they lose their matriarchs, the surviving elephants will have many kinds of social aggression and deviant, or just strange behaviors. And she would make comparisons with how they responded to, say, matriarchs or other elephants succumbing to poaching, and that she noted that they would have equally similar trauma responses to PTSD sufferers. So startle responses and exercises of aggression that would be out of the ordinary for elephants with stable social support systems.

Mike: And so when a herd loses a matriarch, there is a destabilization of sorts that occurs. Is that what you’re saying?

Katijah: Yeah. A destabilization, basically a loss of wisdom. I think with any kind of, even with human communities, when you lose an elder, for example, you lose a certain heritage or a certain kind of intellectual knowledge. And I think there’s a fair parallel with that with elephants as well. Yeah.

Mike: So the next category, if we’re going to call them that, is called human-impacted time. And you cite deforestation and the destruction of elephant cultures at human hands as an example of this. Can you explain more about this category? How can we observe elephant temporality from human impact and time?

Katijah: Yeah. So my thesis argument is that if we want to understand and appreciate animals, we have to consider that they have a meaningful and complex relationship with time that is their own. And I should explain why that is generative, because often we think of time as a socially or culturally neutral phenomenon. We think that, oh, if this is how we experience time, it is for everyone else. And I bring up this possibility that elephants may have their own expressions of time because I think if we have an anthropocentric idea, or a very human-focused idea of time, we may risk blinkering these other expressions of time that are intangible. We often think about the material. So I think, for example, when we commit deforestation, elephants may lose common paths that they had once relied on for certain resources. Or elephants may lose certain options of how to avoid humans, and then this exacerbates human-elephant conflict. But I think it can go a little deeper, human-impacted time. I think, for example, we can consider how zoos may or may not deal with the issue of boredom, or that animals can experience boredom in prolonged captivity, or how we want to think about trauma for animals, especially when we consider things like rewilding and we introduce things like trauma to ensure that wild animals are afraid of humans, and so on and so forth. There’s a way of thinking deeper about how they’re impacted in ways that maybe we can’t see physiologically or empirically, at least for now. Yeah.

Mike: You talk about agreements between mammals like dolphins and whales and humans, and how when these agreements are violated, violence can ensue, such as with human-elephant conflict that we see today. Can you talk more about this subject? Are there agreements between humans and elephants that you specifically observe that get broken? What does your research show about this?

Katijah: Agreements wouldn’t be conscious contracts that are made between different species. But I think when there’s a certain practice that’s been applied for many centuries, for example, then there are expectations between species. So in Malaysia, for example, in the Belum Forest, my friend studies the Indigenous communities there, and they’ve had this multi-millennial relationship with wild elephants where they understand that there are certain seasons where elephants prefer a kind of fruit. The human communities will avoid the paths to access this fruit because they know the elephants will come. So there’s this understanding between both species that this is a time of the forest when it will be largely populated by the elephants, so we’ll leave them alone. It’s this sort of dialogue that develops between both species as they share a space. So it’s based on the expectations built between them over time. And that’s what I mean by agreement. Again, it’s not written, it’s not formal in the way we think about it in society. But they are agreements.

Mike: And what happens when those agreements are violated? What are some of the agreements that are being violated right now, today?

Katijah: Deforestation is probably the most obvious, where suddenly, where there was a time when they could divide certain resources between one another, like for example this preferred fruit, now you have just less landmass to choose from and they’re being pushed closer and closer to each other. And then suddenly this conflict ensues. And when we behold this conflict, we think of it as being in a vacuum. But no, all conflicts have long histories. I think often this betrayed sense of agreements comes through, that we just haven’t really acknowledged yet. And it deepens, I think, the scope of conservation maybe in the sense that we can think of not just ensuring certain numbers of elephants, but ensuring there’s a certain habitat enough for them to exercise maybe more intangible things like their memories of their places.

Mike: The thing that I’m thinking about that’s concerning me here is that modern industrialization is rather recent. And so the ability to raise vast amounts of rainforest in one fell swoop is not an old practice. It’s rather new. And the thing that I’m worried about is, what’s that going to do to the elephant’s psyche when previous generations for millennia relied on the knowledge that forest was relatively stable, that it mostly wasn’t going anywhere? It might get impacted here and there in bits and pieces, but there was no modern industrial machinery to just chop it all down. And now we have that. What’s that doing, do you think, to the psyche of an elephant community or the generational knowledge that gets passed down? Does your research dig into that at all?

Katijah: Currently a lot of my research is looking at to what extent we can acknowledge their dynamism. And really a lot of my papers currently are about the plausibility of the idea of animals being temporal subjects. I think for a lot of people, people who deal with elephants outside laboratories and outside scientific spaces understand that instinctively and intuitively when they talk about their elephants and so on. But I think I’m still trying to build legitimacy for the concept at this very early stage in my research career. However, to your point about this rapid deforestation we are seeing, especially in places where there’s high urbanization like in India, elephants are, like I said, dynamic creatures. And there have been some studies of elephants slowly changing their social organization. So in the past, male elephants were quite solitary. They would be on their own most of the time, and they would just come back to the herd for meeting purposes. But now because of this intense urbanization, a novel strategy that has emerged is that more and more male herds are gathering. So the males are slowly becoming little herds themselves. They’re also changing their temporal patterns. So in the past they would forage in the day, but now because of so much human contact, you can see them shifting their foraging to the evenings. So they are very responsive to human time. They know that humans are going to be around in the daytime more. There’s high risk whenever there are more interactions with humans, and they have to form these alliances. So you can see that there are some strategies that are in play to respond to this rapid urbanization. In terms of psyche, it’s so hard to say. I’m not a psychologist who can make responsible deductions. But if Gay Bradshaw’s work is a sign, then I do foresee more PTSD and more novel behaviors. And I think there may be pressure to try to bring elephants back to a natural state of some kind, or a natural psyche, if we can think of what that is. But I can’t imagine it being very good.

Mike: I was interviewing one of my colleagues, Alejandro Prescott Cornejo, and he was in Rwanda. And I believe he was on a hike to see, I think it was mountain gorillas. I’ll have to double check. But the guides that were guiding the group told them to leave their walking sticks behind when they were starting to approach. And the reason why was because the walking sticks could trigger the gorillas’ memory of people with guns, essentially, which was an occurrence they experienced in the past. And that really left an impression on me, that story. And I can imagine that it works similarly with elephants in terms of human-elephant conflict, or in cases of destabilization, armed conflict in nations where elephants reside. So can you talk about the traumas experienced by elephants, either by the individuals or the generations before, and perhaps how that’s showing up in their concept of time?

Katijah: I think the sort of strange social organizations that are happening now, that are unprecedented, are definitely a sign that culturally they have decided to respond as a collective to these different urban or anthropogenic forms of change. That, I think, has some level of trauma. Back in the early 2000s, NPR and The New York Times were covering this phenomenon where juvenile male elephants were raping rhino calves. And many were speculating that this was a trauma response. So these are not my areas of expertise, but from my research, I would say that’s the power of elephant temporality. When you grasp this idea, and when you said, just knowing that the gorillas can respond to this sort of trauma, you can imagine, and then you pause. And I think what stirs is that it creates this depth of, oh, this is what animals, this is the capacity of what they can suffer. That is very similar to us. That pushes our imagination about how to think and account for the kind of suffering we give, or that we can result in.

Mike: Yeah, I think I’m okay with you putting those words in my mouth. That is a bit what I was getting at.

Katijah: Yeah. And it’s really overlooked. Historically, there has been so much hesitation to consider animals as having this. We don’t want to consider them as having an interiority at all. And so while it’s a subtle argument, I think it has a lot of powerful implications. Even now as we’re discussing it, you’re thinking of all the rich and deep implications of their experience and their suffering that I think are underpinned by time.

Mike: I guess I am curious, because the work you’re doing is quite special, but it seems like there’s a part of it that may, or perhaps it already is, you tell me, that may invite a lot of pushback from being implemented into conservation work or the study of elephant biology or ecology. Have you gotten any pushback from people, and how do you navigate that if you do?

Katijah: So far, I think I’m so early in my research that I haven’t received overt pushback. But I am aware that there are different disciplines that require very deeply empirical forms of evidence. And I think something so intangible like temporal experience can’t easily provide that all the time. The nature of time is that you cannot observe it directly. You can’t separate it like an atom. It has to be observed indirectly. You need mediums. Mediums like behavior. It has to go through something to make it visible, right? Because what is time? It’s just measures of duration. What I’m talking about when I say elephant temporality is the interpretation of duration, how they translate it. And this is not something that we can easily provide in the lab. And it appeals to our intuition, which I think, again, if you’re a very conservative scientist, you may find a little uncomfortable because it enters subjective territory. But the result, or the effects that I’m talking about, are quite real, and the phenomena I’m discussing are quite real. I’ll just throw in an anecdote. I had a chat with one elephant scientist who was quite eminent, and I asked him, and this is very early in my research so I was very liberal with my anthropomorphic questions, but I asked him, do you think elephants are capable of vengeance? And it’s a very anthropomorphic question, I think, conventionally. And he was quiet for a while, and he said there was one time I was doing this study with a bunch of elephants. Every time I went to the research site, I’d get hit by a pineapple. And I thought, okay, the first time I got hit by a pineapple, maybe it was an accident. Maybe some elephant wasn’t thinking. But every time he went back, there was a pineapple that hit him. And he said he needed to find out which elephant kept on hitting him with her pineapple. And they started looking at his papers and he identified there was this one female elephant that kept on throwing it. And he looked at her records. Now, he studies elephant pooping, basically, and he realized that she was the only elephant that was suffering from diarrhea because he was putting stuff in the pineapple to get them to pass motion faster. And he was very serious when he told me the story. Super serious. And I said, okay, but how did she know it was you? If that was an act of vengeance, how did she know it was you? Because there are so many other assistants and so many other people. And he said, yeah, but she knew that before I came along there were no strange pineapples. And so I thought, this is such a beautiful story about this shared grammar of time we can have with animals. And in my research I try not to be too liberal, but when I say animal temporality, I do mean animals that are cognitively sophisticated, who are social or similar to us, long-lived, et cetera. But this is an example of how you can’t not read certain relations. And this is all informed by time. It’s informed by how he knew that she was registering time, she was registering change, she was even assessing who was in charge, I think, if we want to go that liberally. But essentially that was a shared grammar of time that made him understand: I am displeased. You are really making me poop a lot. And I don’t like this. There’s this exchange, and he understands it. Even as a scientist, probably he would not write a paper about it. But these are the sorts of things that are really explainable because of this time and understanding this mindedness that’s informed by time. There’s no other thing working here. There’s no shared body language. There’s nothing else at play. This is about distances and power distances, but it is understood between both. So I think it was a wonderful story.

Mike: That’s a very significant observation. Also quite specific that she chose a pineapple. She could have done much worse. Elephants are large and they can definitely hurt us, and she was like, I’m just going to send a pineapple. That displays a level of thought, a little level of care went into the message that she sent.

Katijah: If I can add, this is how I got really interested in elephants. If you drive four hours out from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I’m from, you get to one of the oldest rainforests in the world, the Belum Rainforest. I would sometimes sit, park my car by the road, because wild elephants would sometimes come out just to warm themselves by the bitumen. And I would always be shocked by their remarkable sentience because they knew you were a stranger, but they could grasp whether you’re dangerous or not. And they could even tell me, switch off your headlights, we want to eat in this area, without language, without anything else at work. And I was like, why is it so difficult for me to describe what this is? Some people talk about elephant personhood, but I feel like that’s so limited because it goes back to us again. We’re always this frame of reference, right? But I think if you just understand them as, hey, I’ve dealt with other humans before, when you understand that there’s this mind and this subjective being at work, then it all makes sense.

Mike: So you write that tracing elephant time requires a method of attentiveness that is able to recognize temporal dynamics, especially temporal dynamics linked to power structures. This might just feed into what we just talked about, but can you tell me more about that? What kind of power structures?

Katijah: This is more of the cultural studies and social science side of things. I was quite influenced by a lot of critical time studies. And basically it works against this conception that all structures of time are universal, or that they’re neutral. Often certain ideas of time are really politically motivated structurally. A common example is capitalist logic pushing this sense of acceleration, forcing us to want to be productive all the time, and then creating the sense of guilt that we’re not productive all the time, so that they can perpetuate capitalist dynamics without coercion. So that’s one common argument. Another argument is that back in the day a lot of anthropology wanted to write about the other, and when they wrote about the other it always had to be that the others were trapped in a past to make them primitive, to make them exotic. So the play of where you place subjects in time has political significance. So that’s where this political influence comes in. And in my thesis I write about this reluctance to think about offering animals interiority. I think it is also political. Because if you stop thinking of animals as deeply able to suffer, when you stop thinking of them as intelligent, it’s so much easier to make them commodities, to make them objects, and to be part of that capitalist logic, as one example.

Mike: Can we talk about what some of the benefits of this research might be? I know I’m not asking you to define anything definitively here, but what could be some of the benefits from this type of work for conservation, for example?

Katijah: I think we touched on it a little bit. For conservation, I think it is to consider maybe not just conserving in terms of volume, in terms of population, but to think about what could be their own intangible heritage. I think in certain ecosystems, what can they exercise that we’ve not thought about? What kind of traumas have we not thought about as part of the conservation effort? But at this current juncture in my research, I’ve just been looking at knowledge practices. Just how history has been using animals without this concept of time. How maybe comparative psychology has been studying animals without the concept of time. I look at how traditional elephant keeping in Thailand has acknowledged time and how that has informed their elephant-keeping practices. I look at zoos and their manipulation of time. So currently that’s where my research is.

Mike: It does make you think about things differently because we often rightly, I think, highlight the amount of species that are going extinct and the numbers as indicators of the health of a species. And all that is fine and good. But everything you’ve just talked to me about for 40 minutes here shows me that there are many other things to consider that we need to be looking at in terms of measuring the health of an individual species beyond their sheer population numbers. Because certainly we wouldn’t apply that same standard to humans as only just being alive as your quality of life. We would talk about other things like whether or not you are in a community where you feel cared for. Do you have food? Do you have adequate shelter? Education? Things like that. So I feel like that is a pretty good way to also be thinking about conservation. Has anyone ever commented to you about the potential for this to inform conservation?

Katijah: No, not yet. I just finished my thesis about a year ago and I’m trying to get papers out. So I haven’t gotten that kind of exposure yet, or that level of curiosity, or potential pushback, as you mentioned earlier. But I welcome as much interaction and curiosity about this project as possible. If I could shamelessly plug it, I think the work increases the depth of empathy we can have for animals, definitely. It can really push the concepts of policy that we’ve also touched on. But I also think it really challenges some of our current basic assumptions about how we think about logic and evidence. That gets a bit more philosophical for a podcast, but just sharing the rich potential of granting animals this very intrinsic and pervasive quality.

Mike: Katijah, I’ve enjoyed talking about this with you. I think it’s really important work, and I’m really glad that we had the chance to speak about it here. Is there anything else you want to mention, or resources that you’d like to direct our listeners to?

Katijah: I think elephant scientists are really great storytellers and they’ve written books and memoirs that are quite famous and well known, but slightly dated now. But I do encourage people to look up all these famous names that you can Google quite easily, and look for their memoirs, and you’ll see that temptation to think about elephants as rich temporal subjects. And just find these hidden strands of time that are so intuitive to us, and apply it to all the animals you encounter. I hope it inspires people to think further about this. If anybody wants collaboration or further interaction, please, I’m really happy and excited to learn more. I’m really just beginning.

Mike: Katijah, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Katijah: Thank you so much. Thanks for the interest.

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