The Meaning of Family

After first reading the third set of quotes I felt that Abram was, in effect, disproving Siebert. Through a more detailed breakdown of what he is saying, we are able to see otherwise. Siebert wants us to become elephants so that we may best understand them and be able to treat them properly. He showed that we have to see things from their perspective in order to make the best decisions about them. However, Abram explains “…we live our bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle…” (10-11). Here, Abram is trying to explain that, as hard as we may try, we will always physically be humans and cannot fully understand anyone but ourselves. Familiarity is defined in the OED as the quality proper to a member of the family. In Siebert’s article, Siebert showed that elephants and their caretakers at the Trust became symbolic family members. The caretakers were the elephants’ allomothers and the elephants continued this family by making the caretakers the allograndmothers to their calfs. This, in essence, made the elephants and the humans family. Because the term familiar means that we know someone like family, we are able to understand from Abram’s passage that, although humans cannot physically transform into elephants, we can symbolically be them. Because they are family, we are actually able to further grasp the “lived experience” (10-11) of the elephants. Humans may not be able to transform magically into elephants or know exactly what they are thinking and why at all times, but because they are our family through the caretakers at the Trust, humans should have the potential of understanding the elephants better than we can with any other species.