When the ENP misses out on an opportunity

When the possibility for proper first contact and claim making flies over the head of an elephant captive sanctuary... (02/02/2025)

This particular post that popped up on my feed(1) (I systematically archive whatever captivity propaganda appears on it to generate a future database, which I may archive online one day), remains a good instance of the inherent limitations of captive facilities - even ones that, like the Elephant Nature Park, categorize themselves as "sanctuaries" and are often understood to be the most progressive of them from the point of view of how they operate in term of controlling or restricting their property, when it comes to language and autonomy. Here, they were lucky enough to film a quite striking phenomenon sometimes observed in both genera of elephants : trunk-modulated production of sounds, where the elephant blows air into it and then releases sound by the trunk, sometimes (but not in this case) to imitate man-made words or sentences. Of course, for said facility this is just a superficial cute thing with no further importance (you will remark the weird, unverifiable claim that "they do it to celebrate how loved ans safe they're here..." ; next we're the one constantly accused of anthropomorphizing them !).

Captive sanctuaries as a rule, at least as far as I'm aware (and I encompass here cetacean ones, extant or projected, although I cannot say in all confidence that this isn't done in some apes one), completely and utterly ignore language and claim making, and this is particularly strange when I've seen online some evidence that even some zoos are starting to use some primitive forms of FluentPet like systems or Yerkish for some of their captives (see below). There is I believe some solid evidence that captive sanctuaries are on some aspects more conservative than zoos regarding the de facto emancipation of their captives on some levels, for complex reasons which I'll analyze in due time somewhere else. 

This ignores of course a well known history of captive elephants using this exact same method to speak, or at least to produce human-level speech that, in time, could lead to bona fide linguistic exchanges and claim making. As I pointed out elsewhere, we know of many cases of elephants using their trunk in that exact fashion to repeat human words at the human hearing range, the two canonical cases being Batyr and Kosik. Scouring the literature, I found reports of similar informal use of trunk modulation among captive African elephants, quite analogous to the recording(2) and I'm confident there must be other reports out there I'm simply not yet familiar with.

It is extremely striking that they parallel well what Lilly called "humanoids" among dolphins(3), the very method he used to get Peter to speak during his first first contact attempt in Saint Thomas (1961-1967), and which, as I pointed out on Randyspeak facebook group, are far more common than Lilly himself assumed : Randy produces them at times, and Jean Floc'h was apparently a master at them (Rampal made them too according to Doak)(4) ; although as far as I'm aware they never repeated a human word or attempted to. We also found ample filmed evidence of their spontaneous use by free orcas and pilot whales when next to and/or interacting with humans, let alone captive cases like the orca Wikie(5) or the beluga NoC(6) (which did repeated words, and which constitute excellent analogs to the cases of Batyr and Kosik), or the one of the free/temporarily captive orca Luna(7), which used the method to apparently imitate boat motors. The striking case of Hoover the seal, a captive harbor seal, must also be mentionned. While we still think heterodyning is in both cases the preferred methodology, air modulation, especially for elephants (which don't meet the pronunciation issues Peter encountered in Saint Thomas and which hearing range fully encompasses ours speech levels, with a peak sensibility at 1khz(8)), may be the way to go in the future.

Two examples of spontaneous "motor boats vocalizations" in Randy/Dony, made during the same hour. Left is courtesy of Marie-Jeanne Isabelle (Original). Right was filmed by me (original) (Brest, 05/05/2024) . Notice how in the last Randy/Dony ends two of the sequences with a "gargle" reminiscent of the Monterey orca. As usual for Randy/Dony during his semi-hemispheric sleep/resting phases, said vocalizations appeared to be disconnected from any intent at communication or imitation and seemed to be done "in the vacuum" for their own cryptic reason.

Left : original post by Denver Zoo conservation alliance (1). Right and above : original video shown in the post, below : video mentioned in it (original). I will comment elsewhere on the nature of their work and its limitations, which appear to draw from previous work on cetaceans made by researchers such as Reiss.