Terrible, horrible story but I can’t stand it when human qualities are projected on to animals.
Anthropomorphism goes back for thousands of years................
Maybe he’s crying because he has Stockholm syndrome and he wants to go back home.
We project human qualities onto animals because we have yet to learn how to project animal qualities onto animals.
Is that what you saw? I saw two different stories; the first being the violation of God's trust in mankind for the proper stewardship of the animals he provided us and the second being mankind answering God's call to rescue this poor animal........
Elephants are indeed intelligent and highly social animals. One could even make the argument that elephants exhibit more characteristics of what God hoped for in mankind than what man is exhibiting today........
Elephants are a special case. They have in past been shown to master elaborate IQ tests individually, and even cooperatively when the test is designed so that a single animal cannot pass it.
They obviously demonstrate the full range of emotions, to include affection, remorse and mourning, anger, greed, competition and cooperation, play, happiness, fright, bravery and self sacrifice, etc. And while some dogs can learn the meanings and context of some 300 human words, elephants are far beyond that to an unknown degree.
Elephant memories of each other and humans can indeed last decades, and they are known for affectionate reunions.
It might even be said that many elephants are even superior in intellect and emotions to many more primitive humans.
If you had a little more humanity in you, perhaps you would realize that all living things have a soul, a behavior mechanism. There are many that feel pain and understand far more about compassion than you could even imagine. So, perhaps we should project animalism upon you rather than embarrass you with stories of compassion and love extended.
Why. We project human qualities on humans that have none. I would bet the elephant has more human qualities than most of the Obama voters.