https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls
One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical – a matriarch's recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water – to the passionate – grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend.
After the elephant had struck him, she "realized" that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. There she stood guard over him through the afternoon, through the night, and into the next day. Her family left her behind, but she stayed on, occasionally touching him with ther trunk. When a herd of buffaloes came to drink at the trough, she left his side and chased them away. It was clear to the man that she "knew" that he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.
Staff members at the Elephant Sanctuary told me of an incident with one of their "girls," who spotted a falled bird outside her barn and ran right over to it, utterly distraught. She crooned and stroked it and did not settle down till it had been properly laid to rest. What did this mean to her, exactly? We don't know. But she was clearly very moved by a fellow creature's woe and had no trouble seeing it for what it was, different life forms through they were.
In his thoughtful 1985 essay "Tool, Image, and Grave," the phiosopher of biology Hans Jonas takes up three activities attributed solely to humans.
On one count, elephants fail the tool test, for they do not make artefacts they then reuse. [...] However, they do use objects as intermediaries between them and their environment, such as stick to scratch between their toes and remove bugs from other areas, or twisted clumps of grass like Q-tips to clean inside their ears or whisks to swat at flies. As J.H. Williams recounts in "Elephant Bill" (1950), work elephants in Asia collared with bells have been known to plug up the bells with mud so that they can go and steal bananas in the middle of the night unnoticed – a purposeful modification of someone else's tool. Elephants dig holes for water, cover them with plugs of bark and grass, and return later to their secret stash. Elephants learn by trial and error what sorts of materials do and do not shock them in their efforts to break through electric fences – and in at least one recorded instance (described in Lawrence Anthony's The Elephant Whisperer, 2009), followed the buzzing of the fence all the way around to its origin, the generator, which, having been stomped to smithereens, allowed them to untwine the fence and go their merry way.
Ruby, who spent almost her entire life at the Phoenix Zoo and was given paints for recreation after her keepers observed her always doodling in the sand, would commonly select paint colors that matched events around her, such as visitors' shirts outside her cage or the red, yellow and white of a fire truck that had pulled up with flashing lights earlier in the day.
Jonas's final and strongest criterion is the grave. [...] Here [man] is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that – whatever it may mean to them – purposively commemorate their dead, in a way Joyce Poole calls "eerie and deeply moving": "It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. it's as even the birds have stopped singing." Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, "they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches."
