While watching Channel 4’s Inside Nature’s Giants last night, I had rather a bizarre and somewhat worrying epiphany; I’ve watched many, many autopsies on humans – both on TV and, years ago, in person when I was studying medical science and forensics – and I never once had a concern that the human was being robbed of dignity, yet I did last night while watching an elephant go under the post-mortem knives. And that kinda worried me because I felt rather uncomfortably like a creepy voyeur while watching this show.

I think I’ve now decided that it’s possibly due to the fact that elephants are among those animals that are revered for their magnificence, their dignity, grace and beauty, not to mention the mysticism surrounding them.

Elephants are the only other animals aside from humans who ritualise death which of course shows a level of cognitive ability that is quite astounding, but, where we humans can give consent for our bodies to be used for medical science after our death, an elephant cannot, and I’ve concluded that was the cause of my unease last night. Nobody asked this beautiful creature how she felt about being dissected on TV and I had to wonder how her nearest and dearest were coping with her bewildering disappearance. Read more & comment »