This article contains a wonderful video of the effect of music on elephants. As the article says, this is not the first time that elephants have shown reactions to music. It seems to calm them, to make them happy. Elephants are born to live in the wild, not cooped up in tiny spaces.
I saw this video the day after seeing a CNN special about men who were incarcerated and kept in solitary confinement, sometimes for years. All of them eventually began mutilating themselves and exhibiting behaviors that were defiant, aggressive, and almost animal-like. I would not suggest that classical music is the answer for those trapped in isolation cells. But there must be a better way to deal with people who have committed terrible crimes, other than to treat them the way we treat animals. Even animals deserve better treatment. We are inhumane to both.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
AMEN, Diane. Have you read The Elephant Whisperer. It is amazing and so is the film.
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Sorry, that space for the elephants was tiny. I hope it’s not where they live all the time.
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Wonderful video clip, loved the elephants swaying to the violins, beautiful. Perhaps this is an experiment suitable for the original understanding of what a “charter school” was supposed to do, that is, experiment with innovations and interventions, like starting the school day with a violin trio, or musical breaks in the day, to see impact and then judge which innovations might best be integrated into other public schools.
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Ironic that the elephants have such appreciation for art and music given the symbolism of one of our major political parties. I suspect that the elephants might not be pleased.
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Why I am vegan. This.
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Plants are living beings also!
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Me, too, Titleonetexasteacher. The following is from an excerpt from a book that I have been writing. It’s in a section called “Talking to Nonvegans about Veganism.”
Nonvegan: Plants have feelings, too.
In the documentary film Native American Prophecy: The Elders Speak, Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper for the Turtle Clan of the Seneca peoples, reminds us that plants form communities:
“No tree grows by itself. A tree is a community. Certain trees—certain plants will gather around certain trees, and certain medicines will gather around certain plants, so that if you kill all the trees—if you cut all the trees, then you are destroying a community—you’re not just destroying a tree, you are destroying a whole community that surrounds it and thrives on it and that may be very important medicine for people or for animals. Because animals know the same medicine—they use this medicine—that’s where we learned. We learned by watching animals. They taught us a lot. Where is the medicine? They’ll tell you because they use it themselves. And if you replant the tree, you don’t replant the community, you replant the tree, so you’ve lost a community, and if you clear cut, which I what is happening . . . then you are really a very destructive force . . . and if you don’t understand that, you will.”
Modern scientists are now documenting what indigenous peoples have always known—that plants communicate with one another, form communities, react to noxious stimuli, and even wage war (by chemical means). Watch an accelerated film of plants vining or turning toward the sunlight, and it’s difficult to escape the impression that one is looking at something very much like an animal—something volitional. But do plants think and feel pain? Do they do what animals do, but just in slow motion and in one place? Here’s what botanist David Chamovitz says about that:
“[T]hinking and information processing are two different constructs. . . . [P]urposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness. Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesn’t include, in my understanding, the ability to think. Just as a plant can’t suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don’t think that it thinks. . . . [T]he term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neurons just as humans don’t have flowers!”
Noetic consciousness is subjective, inner experiencing—nonreflexive awareness of the kind clearly possessed by nonhuman animals. Autonoetic, or reflexive, consciousness is the ability to place one’s self in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, as well as the ability to examine one’s own thoughts. You can think of it as metaconsciousness. Both have been documented widely in nonhuman animals but not in plants. Plants have neither. Plants have neither neural systems for carrying out such activities nor nociceptors for pain, so they are neither conscious nor sensate in any sense that we might use when talking of animals. Though plants do react to noxious stimuli, they simply do not have physical systems associated with registering and experiencing pain. Imagine sticking a pig and a carrot with a knife. It’s easy enough to see the difference.
BTW, Sartre made the distinction between reflexive and nonreflexive consciousness a cornerstone of his philosophy, but that’s another story.
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Oops. Cut the first “from” in the first sentence above. Writing too hastily here.
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You would probably not believe the capability of this elephant if you did not see it for yourself:
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A much more inspiring video of an elephant — actually two — responding to music:
http://youtu.be/hjsu3SGAdLs
If the link doesn’t work, just google “elephant playing piano.”
Ira Fader Massachusetts Teachers Association
Sent from my iPad
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Remember that wonderful scene in Shawshank Redemption when he piped the glorious opera music into the prison yard? And the reactions of those hardened criminals? And the fury of the warden for exposing them to beauty?
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Totally agree…Billy
Billy R. Reagan
(713) 795-9696
(832) 215-8877 cell
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All of which makes the continued slaughter of elephants in Africa to support the poaching of ivory (After China, the United States is the world’s second-largest market for ivory) even more tragic and reprehensible.
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In 1984, Katy Payne, who had studied music as an undergraduate but is now a renowned naturalist, was hanging with the baby elephants at an Oregon zoo when she noticed something unusual. “I felt a throbbing in the air near the elephants,” she recounts. The throbbing was like “how the air used to throb . . . when I sang in the choir . . . near the church organ.” Returning with some recording equipment, Payne made an amazing discovery: The elephants were conversing with one another, continually, in frequencies of sound too low for people to hear. Now, people have been working with elephants for millennia, but they had never before figured that out. Ms. Payne went on to make an exceptional career for herself as an elephant researcher and author. It was Payne who documented, movingly, the rites by which elephants mourn their dead. Not only do some creatures have senses that are more or differently sensitive than ours, but some have senses that we lack entirely.
The quotations above are from Diane Ackerman’s lovely The Moon by Whale Light. New York, Vintage, 1992. Ackerman tells about Katy Payne and the elephants and shares many other wonders. If you haven’t read Ackerman’s book, treat yourself.
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A beautiful post, Diane. Thank you.
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Thank you. sent it to my grandkids.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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