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Animal Behavior
An Elephant’s World From the Mind and Heart of a Matriarch
The book 'Knowing Wonder' follows the rhythm of life within an elephant family.
Posted January 10, 2025 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Merrill Sapp shows how our sense of wonder grows with knowledge as she explores the inner lives of elephants.
- She closes the distance people feel from animals in distant, unfamiliar places.
- With her background in cognitive psychology, she is sensitive to how human choice affects animals.
- The challenges elephants face are approached from their perspective in a new book.
I’m not alone in being amazed by the social, cognitive, and emotional lives of elephants. I try to read just about everything that is written about these magnificent giants, and when I learned about cognitive psychologist Merrill Sapp’s new book Knowing Wonder: An Elephant Story, I couldn’t wait to read it, and I wound up reading it a few times because it is so beautifully written and illustrated.
Part of the book’s description says it all: Combining fiction and nonfiction, Sapp’s book “invites you to explore the world of elephants within the context of real behavior and events connected with scientific insight into their inner lives.” Clearly, every elephant has a story to which we must pay close attention. I am grateful that Merrill Sapp could take some time to discuss her new book.
Why did you write Knowing Wonder?
I wrote it because I want to change the world. African elephants may go extinct in the wild within a couple of decades—mostly because of what people from outside of Africa have done and are continuing to do. I can’t live with that knowledge and not do everything I can to raise awareness and inspire action. The main goal of the book is to close the distance people feel from animals and humans in faraway places to help readers feel more connected to the unfamiliar.
I truly believe what E. O. Wilson claimed about our sense of wonder—that it grows exponentially with knowledge. Some understanding of how elephants exist in the world only deepens the mystery of their amazing lives. This is where the title came from, to feel wonder by knowing about lives so different than our own—and to be more mindful of the impact we can make, bad or good, from halfway around the world.
How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
With my background in cognitive psychology, I am particularly sensitive to the role of human choice in issues like climate change and animal welfare. Throughout this process, I have been struck many times by the parallels between the fields of psychology and ecology. Both are about uncovering hidden causes and effects, and they really should go hand in hand.1
Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important book?
People who don’t read nonfiction because they want a narrative. A good friend of mine, a woman who always has a book going, recently told me that she doesn’t read nonfiction because it’s “boring.” But she still likes to learn as she reads, like from a thoroughly researched historical novel.
That is the idea here—even though Knowing Wonder is fiction, and the elephants are characters in a story, it relies on real behaviors and real science within the narrative. Many readers who want a story still revel in something they can sink their teeth into to feel like they have gotten a glimpse into another world. I hope this book will be a bridge for these readers to get interested in more science-based material—to realize they enjoy that part of it and want to read more. But even if it doesn’t, they can learn some important things just from the book, especially about the essential ecological role of elephants.
What are some of the major topics you consider?
I try to accurately represent elephants as individuals with personalities—individuals whose quality of life is both dependent on an intact social structure and essential to their survival. Elephants are easy, actually not just easy but impossible not to see this way if you look close enough.
It is also impossible to ignore the habitat loss that is threatening so many species. So, if you care about animals, you have to care about climate change.
Some ecologists are pushing for animal behavior, with consideration of their internal lives, to be included in ecology. It is tremendously exciting—putting together the pieces of how animals respond to their surroundings and how their surroundings respond back. This is most obvious for animals like elephants, who are both cognitively complex and ecosystem engineers. The choices they make shape our world and vice versa.
One chapter is sort of a side topic: elephants in captivity. This was partly inspired by some of your writing in The Animals’ Agenda and Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed. After developing the characters and showing them living in and navigating a complex world, I thought it was important to acknowledge what life can be like for these same animals in captivity.
When we see elephants as the beautiful and emotional beings they are, we have to ask ourselves—what does this ask of us? I want to challenge the head and the heart.
How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
The narrative makes it different. There are some wonderful books, mostly memoirs from conservationists and researchers who have lived their lives around elephants, that share special knowledge and personal experiences. In Knowing Wonder, elephants are the main characters and are central to the story. The challenges they face are approached from their perspective—how Lua responds meaningfully to changes around her and the needs of her family.
Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the cognitive and emotional lives of elephants (and other animals), they will treat them with more respect, dignity, and compassion?
Yes. I hope readers enjoy the elephant characters and feel they’ve gotten to know them. That will be one step towards treating elephants better. But many of the things we think make us uniquely human aren’t unique at all, and every animal has something that makes it special, as well as an ecological role.
Elephants have “name-like” calls for each other so that in a social group, an elephant knows when she is being addressed. Rodents produce ultrasonic vibrations that cluster scent particles together and enhance their sense of smell. Could that be why those giant rats are so good at sniffing out illegal wildlife items, landmines, and tuberculosis?
All this research has been published in the last few months. Amazing! Elephants are truly extraordinary and deserve better treatment, but all animals do, even those who aren’t as complex or easy to love.
References
In conversation with Dr. Merrill Sapp, a cognitive psychologist, physician assistant, professor, and student of nature. She has traveled the world to learn about and work in the service of elephants. As a cognitive psychologist, she explores elephants' experience of the world to show how they respond to their surroundings and how their surroundings respond back. Her writing has appeared in About Place Journal, Ecological Citizen, Earth Island Journal, and Mongabay News. She teaches at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
1) I have had the privilege of traveling in some beautiful and remote parts of the world. People in these places can talk about how the warming Earth has affected them personally. They can point out specific changes they’ve experienced—unpredictable rainy seasons and lowering water levels, not knowing if the rain will be enough next year. Their life stories may also include negative encounters with wild animals, which happen more often when animals struggle to find water or food. These stories make the impact of climate change feel very personal, more than at home.
Mercado III, E. & Zhuo, J (2024). Do rodents smell with sound? Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 167.
Pardo, M.A., Fristrup, K., Lolchuragi, D.S., Poole, J.H., Granli, P., Moss, C., Douglas-Hamilton, D., & Wittemyer, G. (2024). African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 1353–1364.
Sapp, M. *2023). Do we love elephants enough to let them live free? Mongabay, June 27, 2021.
Szott, I.D., et al. (2024). Ratting on wildlife crime: training African giant pouched rats to detect illegally trafficked wildlife. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 5:1444126.
Wilson, E.O. (1986). Biophilia. Harvard University Press.
