What would happen if an Asian elephant meets an African elephant? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

What would happen if an Asian elephant meets an African elephant? First off, it’s not recommended, although not for the reasons you might suspect. But I’ll get to that.

Generally speaking, the same thing that would happen as when any two elephants meet that had never met before. It would depend on the situation. If one or the other felt threatened, the dominant one, normally the larger one (which likely means the African), would establish its dominance, and the other one would accept that. This is what likely would happen in the wild, where there was a matriarch in charge, or a big bull. The herd or family structure would need to be maintained. But this would never happen naturally, of course, since they are from different continents.

If it was in a zoo, where the “herd” structure would not be as strong, there would probably be no perceived threat (after careful introduction), and they would mingle and get to know each other. Perhaps even bond; particularly if they were both being mistreated in captivity, lonely, or suffering from any kind of PTSD. They may end up comforting each other. All elephants are very intelligent and have a wide range of genuine emotions. Empathy is something that all elephants openly possess. Here is an Asian Elephant meeting an African Elephant for the first time.

Having said all that, elephants have strong individual personalities. So it’s impossible to predict exactly what any of them would do, with 100% accuracy. They didn’t read the human-written book “Elephant Behavior”. But overall, there seems to be no inherent prejudice or bigotry between elephants of different species or sub-species; they aren’t humans, after all.

Here is the reason mixing them is not recommended. When elephant captivity was in its infancy, it was thought to be perfectly acceptable to mix Asians with Africans. Aside from the two species having a different “language” (which eventually they seem to overcome), and the fact that Africans tend to be a bit rougher in their interaction with each other, socially, there isn’t much problem. The well-known problem comes with the fact that there is a virus called EEHV; in fact there are two types of EEHV. One is found in Africans in a latent form, which means they are carriers and it doesn’t affect them. But it can easily be transferred to Asian Elephants, which causes deaths of baby Asian calves by causing internal bleeding. EEHV is the number one killer of baby captive elephants. Just like in humans, losing a newborn can cause deep depression in a mother elephant, particularly considering the extremely long gestation period that elephants go through. The other form of EEHV can devastate African herds when transferred from Asian Elephants. Very few zoos and parks in the US will mix herds of Africans with Asians these days, because of EEHV risks. The exception is when all the members of a herd are beyond breeding age, as babies are the only ones at risk. So, if you ever happen to go to a park where the two species are intermingling, you can be fairly certain that all of the elephants are relatively mature; say forty to fifty years old, or older.

Elephants, regardless of species, are much better at getting along with each other’s differences than humans are. At risk of being clichè, we could learn a thing or two, from our pachyderm friends.

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