Mongabay Newscast

Understanding how elephants experience time might change how we protect them

10 Mar 2026

Audio

Description

Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany, says she's trying to build legitimacy around the concept of animal temporality — the ability to experience time — specifically in elephants. Doing so could have implications for conservation and beyond. "How we envision an animal's relationship to time influences whether we see them as feeling, remembering beings. My aim is to encourage a more dynamic view of their place in the world when we recognize them as equally temporal beings." This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Rahmat explains three key areas of evidence for interpreting elephant temporal experience and how this knowledge could be folded into how we think about protecting elephants or animals in general. "I think it increases the depth of empathy we can have for animals," she says. "It can really push the concepts of policy … but it also can really challenge some of our current, basic assumptions about how we think about logic and evidence." Image credit: An elephant that has just wallowed in mud in the Linyanti River in northern Botswana. Image by Roger Borgelid for Mongabay. Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here. —— Timecodes (00:00) Why study how animals experience time? (06:58) Elephant eco-cultural identity (11:58) Human-impacted time (27:03) Individual elephant history (34:44) Getting hit with a pineapple is no accident (39:30) How this might help conservation

Transcription

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Help us prioritize this episode for transcription by upvoting it.

0 upvotes

🗳️ Sign in to Upvote

Popular episodes get transcribed faster

Other recent transcribed episodes

Transcribed and ready to explore now

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

01 Jan 1970

Fin de Semana

2ª PARTE | 06 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

3ª PARTE | 22 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

3ª PARTE | 04 MAR 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

01 Jan 1970

El Partidazo de COPE

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.

Report any issue

Mongabay Newscast

Understanding how elephants experience time might change how we protect them

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other recent transcribed episodes

13:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

10:00H | 21 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

12:00H | 20 DIC 2025 | Fin de Semana

2ª PARTE | 06 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

3ª PARTE | 22 ENE 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

3ª PARTE | 04 MAR 2026 | EL PARTIDAZO DE COPE

Sign in to Audioscrape

Share this moment