Mount Elgon Elephants Seek the Same Medicinal Plants as Human Neighbors

Around Kenya's Mount Elgon, an elephant that looks unwell will sometimes walk a long way to one particular tree, eating nothing on the route, local experts say. The trip is for that tree's bark or leaves and nothing else. The people living nearby treat their own ailments with many of the same plants.

The overlap comes from a 2026 study in Scientific Reports led by the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Observing wild African elephants, Loxodonta africana, directly is dangerous. So the team interviewed eight Indigenous Sabaot experts, including guides, community wildlife wardens and a former park ranger, each with more than 20 years alongside the animals.

Those experts named 39 natural resources that make up what they consider the elephants' medicinal diet. Local communities use 87 percent of them as medicine too. Twenty-five were described outright as elephant medicine. Eight species, among them Aloe arborescens, Bersama abyssinica and Ficus natalensis, passed the study's strictest test, which separates ordinary browsing from an apparently ill animal going after one specific plant, in small amounts, outside its normal habits.

The experts also described mothers giving plants to their calves, which the researchers call maternal allomedication, or treating someone other than yourself. The team cautions that neither the preparation involved nor any health benefit has been confirmed. Primatologist Michael Huffman of Nagasaki University, who wasn't involved, says it remains open whether mothers choose plants for a calf's particular symptoms or simply share what they normally eat.

The researchers suggest the habit may pass from mother to calf, much as has been documented in chimpanzees. It also leaves open whether people first learned these remedies by watching elephants.

The team has handed video cameras to Mount Elgon's park rangers. The Aloe arborescens still isn't saying who found it first.

Read the full story at Agencia SINC, September 24, 2026

Hot Take: A sick elephant will walk past every meal on Mount Elgon for one tree. Some of us can't get to the pharmacy without stopping at Taco Bell.