Elephant

Loxodonta africana

Big, gentle, remembers exactly what you said in 2009.

Only 1.1% of people are Elephants. (estimated)

If you're an Elephant

You are social, loyal, and in no hurry. You keep a large extended family and you know every member's history. You communicate in ways others don't register, and you are curious enough to investigate anything new with great care. People come to you in a crisis because you are calm, large, and have clearly been through this before.

Elephants communicate with rumbles below the range of human hearing, and these travel for kilometers through the air and through the ground.

Find out if you're an Elephant

The Elephant as a spirit animal

You are the person people organize themselves around. You are patient, thoughtful, and loyal for life, and you carry the memory for the whole group. The flaw is that you carry all of it, including the slights, and you move slowly enough that grievances have time to settle in. You would never say so. You simply remember, and the other party notices that you remember.

Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.

How to get along with an Elephant

Do

Go slowly; an elephant changes direction, but not quickly and never under pressure.
Involve the family; decisions are made by the group and led by its eldest.
Let them investigate; a new object gets touched, smelled and considered before it is accepted.

Don't

Don't lie to them; it is remembered, in detail, for decades.
Don't rush a goodbye; elephants take their leave slowly, and it matters.

When it goes wrong: A stressed elephant goes quiet and still, ears out, before it charges; stop, back off, and never stand between it and its young.

The Elephant in a relationship

You love for the long term and across a wide circle. Elephant females stay with their mothers and sisters for life while the males visit, so you understand devotion as something built with many people over decades. You are slow to fall and slower to leave. Your partner gets the whole herd.

Engraving of a sperm whale, from Brehms Tierleben (1893)

Best matchSperm WhaleBoth live in families led by older females, speak in long-distance sound, and raise their young slowly; the same society in two different media.

Engraving of a honeybee, from Brehms Thierleben (1876)

Handle with careHoneybeeElephants avoid beehives so reliably that farmers fence crops with them; the bee is the one small thing that moves an elephant.

Field notes

Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works

Sociability
Boldness
Energy
Curiosity
Devotion
Roaming

An elephant herd is led by its oldest female, and her memory of distant water sources can decide whether the group survives a drought.
Elephant pregnancy lasts about 22 months, the longest of any land mammal.
Elephants have passed the mirror self-recognition test, and they return to the bones of dead elephants and touch them with their trunks.

Elephants in literature

Hathi — The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (1894)
The Elephant's Child — Just So Stories (The Elephant's Child), Rudyard Kipling (1902)
Tantor — Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.

Closest personalities

The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Elephant's. If you got Elephant, one of these was probably your runner-up.

Other mammals

Wolf Red Fox Brown Bear Polar Bear Lion Tiger Leopard Cheetah Giraffe Hippopotamus Gorilla Orangutan Sloth Koala Kangaroo Platypus Otter Beaver Badger Raccoon Hedgehog Bat Camel Dolphin Sperm Whale

Among the 60

Friedrich Specht (1839–1909), Brehm's Life of Animals, Alfred Brehm (1895). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits