Honorable Elephant

Maybe monkeys can get away with lounging on the ground, but elephants must be held to a higher standard.

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant!

An elephant's faithful, one-hundred percent!

— Horton, Horton Hatches the Egg

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Thanks to its size, the movements of an elephant tend to be slow and ponderous. While it's impossible to know whether an elephant's inner life is more somber and dignified than, say, that of an otter, it certainly looks that way. This impression of elephants is compounded by the fact that elephants are observed engaging in what appears to be reverence for their dead. It seems likely that they are aware of their own mortality, given that when encountering fallen members of their kind, elephants will pause and observe, to the point of picking up and inspecting loose bones they might find. The prodigious memory of elephants also makes it seem that their lives must be more burdened by history and the past than animals with less powerful memories, which exist more "in the moment".

An anthropomorphized elephant or mammoth will typically be honorable and stoic. A young elephant may be more playful, but is unlikely to be a willful troublemaker. Ironically, while in Real Life female elephants tend to be the most involved in the complex social behaviors which make them so easily identified-with, fictitious elephantine heroes tend to be males — perhaps because something so massive and thick-skinned as an elephant seems masculine even when the beast is female.

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Some aspects of Real Life elephants, such as their excellent memories, may be portrayed widely in fiction, while other aspects, such as the feeling of Unstoppable Rage and lust males feel during musth, may be played down. Except in the case they encounter dirty rats.

Compare Genial Giraffe, another friendly animal that is often seen together with elephants. The polar opposite of the Cruel Elephant.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Aggretsuko, the president of whatever company the characters work at is an elephant. He's kinda forgetful and a little incompetent, but he's a Nice Guy and a Reasonable Authority Figure, especially when compared to folks like Hog Honcho/Director Ton, Scatherine/Tsubone, and Boss Buffalo/Yagyū. It should be noted, though, that Eaglette/Washimi, one of Retsuko's best friends, is the President's personal secretary, so how much of this is his normal behavior and how much of this is Eaglette pulling strings to help her friend have a good time at work is unknown.

• The Jungle Book: Hathi the elephant, like his book counterpart, is the temperate but righteous leader and lawgiver of the jungle.
• In Sands of Destruction, hospital administrator Elephas Rex refuses to turn away patients. It turns out that he is a former war criminal who hopes to die having saved more lives than he took.

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Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Master Paopao is an anthropomorphic elephant who loves to advocate peace, is known for his fairness when holding court trials, and is all-around friendly.

Audio Play

• Benjamin Blumchen: The hero eponymous hero is a talking elephant with a strong sense of justice and a Gentle Giant personality.

Card Games

• In Magic: The Gathering, elephants (including the loxodon) are usually Green or White, the colours most invocative of honour. Still, as Light Is Not Good, the loxodon of Mirrodin were brute bigots incapable of acknowledging moral complexity.

Comic Books

• Green Lantern: Brother Warth is a member of the Blue Lantern Corps., hand picked by its leader.
• Scooby-Doo: in the comic adaptation of "Bedlam in the Big Top," (Gold Key #9, "The Phantom Clown"), Velma finds out that Bertha the circus elephant never responded to commands because she's a German elephant and responds only to German commands. Velma uses this in getting Bertha to help defeat the Phantom Clown.

Eastern European Animation

• 38 Parrots: Elephant is shy, bookish and constantly apologizing.
• Adventures of Mowgli: Hatkhi from the Soviet adaptation is a very respected and dignified authority figure, akin to a lawkeeper, and with none of the goofy traits of his Disney counterpart.

Fan Works

• Martha the mammoth from Prehistoric Park is amongst the animals rescued for the titular park in Prehistoric Earth. Much like in the series she's originally from, she's a gentle soul and she even ends up being used to combat against a rogue female t. rex that the story's villains attempt to use to cause chaos at the park for the sake of their own plans.
• All the prehistoric elephants rescued in Prehistoric Park Reimagined prove to be largely friendly and agreeable gentle giants. Martha in particular is every bit the kindly Gentle Giant that she was in the original Prehistoric Park (even managing to sympathize and form a bond with Jerk with a Heart of Gold security chief Nikolai). But just to be safe, all the adult males are largely kept separate from the youngsters and adult females at the park, just in case.
• In This Bites!, Funkfreed (the sword-turned-elephant belonging to Spandam of Cipher Pol 0) comes into the possession of self-insert hero Cross. He proves to be quite a friendly individual when he's working with the Straw Hats, if a bit of a bruiser, which is why he was never satisfied with having Spandam as a wielder.

Film — Animated

• Dumbo: The title character is playful but never malicious. The Matriarch invokes this trope ("We elephants have always walked with dignity.") but is actually a Cruel Elephant behind her dignified facade. Mrs. Jumbo plays it straighter, not that it helps her.
• Ice Age: Manny is an honorable mammoth. He feels morally obligated to return a human baby to his family even though he knows that the child could one day grow up to be a mammoth-killer, and although he's grouchy and reclusive at times, he's definitely the most principled and moral of the main characters.
• In The Jungle Book (1967), Hathi is like an honorable, respectable (if not too bright) British army officer.
• Tarzan: Tantor may be a Cowardly Lion, but when his friends are in danger he overcomes his fear and helps them.

Film — Live-Action

• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has Fridge taming an elephant that helps them in fighting Van Pelt.
• The Jungle Book (2016) has the elephants play a more important role, with them becoming Physical Gods who had shaped the jungle into its current state. They become grateful to Mowgli rescuing one of their calves, and they in turn help him put out the fire he accidentally started near the end of the movie.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Behemoth — a Kaiju who resembles a cross between a mammoth and a ground sloth — plays with this; he's portrayed as destructive under Ghidorah's command, but later proves to be a docile and beneficial creature once Godzilla takes charge, restoring much of the Amazon rainforest just by walking around. Though only appearing in a few scenes, he's become a fan favourite, in large part for his weird, striking design.
• Mowgli: This incarnation of Hathi is more true to his book counterpart, being a benevolent ruler of the jungle. He saves Mowgli from a tiger pit and later gathers the other elephants to help the boy defeat Shere Khan in return for showing him the hunter who shot part of his tusk off.

Literature

• Bill Peet's The Ant and the Elephant features an elephant who goes out of his way to help animals in trouble, though only one — the ant — shows any gratitude.
• In Babar, the elephants live in The Good Kingdom, while the rhinoceroses seem to be a military dictatorship ruled by an Insane Admiral.
• In Bravelands, elephants are the most spiritual animals in the Bravelands, telling the future by touching the bones of dead animals. The past is very important to them, and they love telling stories. Just like in real-life, a matriarch leads them and lets the herd make decisions together.
• Dinotopia: Mammoths and other prehistoric proboscideans are all portrayed this way. One particular mammoth, Bigtusk, is one of the leading Habitat Partners.
• Dr. Seuss wrote of Horton, an elephant who was always faithful, 100%. He both safeguards a tiny, invisible world and incubates an egg in his custody.

• In The Enormous Crocodile, by Roald Dahl, the eponymous Card-Carrying Villain's attempts to prey on children are all foiled by four friendly animals, the fourth one being Trunky the Elephant, who gets rid of him once and for all by grabbing him with his trunk and hurling him into the sun. (It's a kids book; Cartoon Physics apply.)
• In The Jungle Book, Hathi is a wise (and honorable) Lord of the Jungle, who follows orders from nobody. Except for Mowgli, sending him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• The mammoths in Quest for Fire, particularly the chief mammoth who befriends the human protagonist. They are intelligent and loyal creatures who defend said protagonist and his companions from a Cannibal Tribe.
• Reynard the Fox, a 12th century parody of Medieval Feudalism where carnivores are nobles and herbivores are peasants, the elephant was allowed to join the royal court because of his great intelligence.
• Richard Scarry: Polite Elephant is a Gentle Giant who exists to teach kids good manners by example.

Live-Action TV

• Prehistoric Park features Martha the mammoth. She first appears unsuccessfully trying to aid her sister, who has died falling in a pit trap made by early humans. Later, although she becomes an outcast from the African elephant herd the park attempts to bond her with, she stands up to Matilda, a young T. rex, when Matilda targets the matriarch's calf, leading to her being accepted into the herd.
• In Primeval, a Columbian mammoth saves James Lester from a Future Predator in one episode. At the beginning of the episode he'd been making jokes about selling the mammoth for ivory. At the end of the episode, he brings it treats and cements his status as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• In Walking with Beasts, honor seems to increase in the proboscidean family tree as it gets closer to modern elephants.
  • In "Mammoth Journey", female woolly mammoths and their young live in family groups that stick together and quietly help each other when facing predators and climatic hardships. The most unprovoked aggression seen consists of an adult male in musth chasing off a herd of bison with a mildly threatening trot, and an older bull scaring two cave lions out of his way when he migrates south (though said lions were feeding on a human carcass).
  • Deinotherium in "Next of Kin", in contrast, are sadistic bullies that seem to revel on chasing hominids out of waterholes or because they are on heat. Bear in mind that this is as much elephantine behavior as the one exhibited by the mammoths. The series gives all positive traits to one lineage and all negative traits to the other, who also happens to be the uglier, less elephant-looking one.
  • The goofy-looking Moeritherium in "Whale Killer" are perfect pacifists that don't really look or act like elephants. One is chased by the threatening Basilosaurus, but unlike most prey animals in the series it is given the chance to escape.
• The Ultra Series have two elephant-looking kaiju, Zuruzula from Ultraman 80 and Gazebo from Ultraman: Towards the Future, neither of them which are hostile or violent. The former is a harmless zoo animal who was accidentally transformed into a monster after being exposed to Minus Energy, and even in it's giant state Zuruzula is never seen attacking the city or destroying buildings, only using it's trunks to blast high-pressure jets of water at UGM planes when they attack him, in self-defense, resulting in Ultraman Eighty purging the Minus Energy from inside him turning Zuruzula back to a zoo animal. The latter is a forest guardian protecting the environment and defending his own territory, causing Ultraman Great to put him into a Deep Sleep rather than killing it.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible: A likely candidate for the Behemoth, a biblical creature mentioned in the Book of Job, is the now extinct giant Syrian elephant. Described to show the limits of man's power against God's nature, Behemoth is described as the most powerful land animal on the planet. In particular, the wording used to describe its greatness imply both physical and intellectual might. It's so big it has to use trees for shade and has giant horns/tusks it can gore the Leviathan with — certainly a beast that shouldn't be trifled with. Yet it spends its days peacefully in the fields and swamps, eating grass as the smaller beasts play around it, showing that it's a Gentle Giant herbivore if left in peace.
• Buddhism: The Buddha was an honorable elephant in several of his previous lives, and the popularity of white elephants in Thailand has to do with Buddha taking the form of a six-tusked white elephant.
• Hindu Mythology: Played entirely straight, as elephants often symbolize wisdom, grace, power and kingliness. Eight divine elephants carry the world on their backs, and a white four-tusked elephant is the mount of the storm god Indra. The elephant-headed god Ganesha, one of the most popular gods in Hinduism, removes obstacles and gives people good luck, as well as protecting children.

Theatre

• Horton the Elephant is the main protagonist of Seussical, which adapts both Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg, among other Seuss books. Here, he is called upon to guard the Whos and sit on Mayzie's egg at the same time, presenting a moral dilemma as to which innocent life to protect.

Video Games

• Elephant Quest: The title character is both stoically determined to regain his hat, and loyally prepared to undergo Side Quests for his friends while he does so. Averted with the other elephants, who are excitable Apathetic Citizens.
• King of Dragon Pass tells the story of Issaries' quest to make peace between the Big-Teeth (sabretooth cats) and Long-Noses (mammoths). It's specifically noted that the Long-Noses didn't cause the war and are only fighting back in self-defense. Unlike their enemies, they care about Long-Nose fallen being given their rightful Due to the Dead, and will not try to treacherously attack Issaries after he helps them.
• Pokémon Donphan is known for clearing roads after disasters, while Cufant and Copperajah are both known to help humans with heavy lifting. Copperajah is even Chairman Rose's signature Pokémon.
• Animal Crossing has some elephant villagers throughout the series, and many of them are nice animals, even the Cranky or Snooty elephants
• Smite: The elephant-headed god Ganesha is a guardian that shares his kill benefits even better to his nearby teammates. He's also able to slow down while granting protections to his teammates.
• Far Cry 4: In a franchise known for Everything Is Trying to Kill You when it comes to wildlife, elephants stand out for being the one animal that won't try to harm Ajay unless he attacks them- the only humans that they attack unprovoked are Royal Army troops. With the right skill, it's even possible to ride on their backs and deliver a Foe-Tossing Charge at enemies and vehicles.
• Downplayed in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Chloe and Nadine's Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure is healed when they work together to save a female Asian elephant pinned under a stone column that Asav's men blew over with their explosive weaponry. They then have a Pet the Dog moment riding the elephant back to her family, but once they're reunited, the elephants don't do anything more to help the girls, and Nadine has to warn Chloe not to step too close to them, otherwise the bull "Will. Kill you."
• In the backstory of Syberia, the Youkol tribe had domesticated mammoths and had lived in a symbiotic relationship. It is said that even to this day they live off the remains of mammoths frozen in ice. In Syberia II, it is revealed that mammoths are still living on the far away land of Syberia. When Kate and Hans finally arrive there, the mammoths are immediately friendly towards Hans, who mounts one and rides away..

Web Original

• DSBT InsaniT: Even after Dave ends up scaring him, Eunice the elephant abruptly stops rampaging when he runs up to Asia.

Western Animation

• Bozo: The World's Most Famous Clown befriends Hercules, the circus elephant. Hercules comes to the rescue after Bozo and Butch are held captive by two thugs who stole the circus receipts.

• Shep is the pet elephant of George of the Jungle, whom George says is "a big peanut-loving puppy dog."
• Goliath II is about a mouse-sized elephant who wants to get the respect of his pompous father.
• Fumbo the mighty jumbo is among the friends (and accomplices) of The Hair Bear Bunch.

• In Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Constable Hu is an elephant By-the-Book Cop. He has occasionally been an antagonist, for instance in "The Midnight Stranger", when he bans kung fu entirely, but will graciously admit his mistakes when they become apparent.

• Journey Through the Jungle of Words has Schnoz Ali, who is said to be a well-known explorer, as Dualot said: "Who doesn't know Schnoz Ali?"
• Let's Go Luna!:
  • Gaja and his father Aman, who appear in the episode "Guitar to Sitar", are both very kind elephants who help Carmen play a song on the sitar for her mother's birthday.
  • Maktao grows to be one in "Me and My Elephant."
• The Lion Guard has the Pride Lands' local African elephant family, which consists of these. Particularly Ma Tembo, the matriarch, and Mtoto, a young calf who looks up to Beshte and hopes to grow up into a hero like him.
• Looney Tunes: Hobo Bobo is a pint-sized elephant who gets tired of lugging logs all the time so he runs off to America seeking his fortune. It becomes a misadventure for him and in the end he winds up exactly where he started, albeit in a different locale. In a later cartoon he becomes a baseball star after an umpire invokes Animal Athlete Loophole.

• The elephant of the Mighty Mouse cartoon "The Helpless Hippo" is the hero's loyal steed and alerts him of any trouble in progress.
• In Primal, Spear and Fang hunt and kill an injured woolly mammoth for food and insulation. The rest of the herd come across the dead mammoth's remains and track down Spear and Fang to the cave where they're hiding for the night, upon which the herd attacks the two of them relentlessly. As it seems, though, what they really wanted was a tusk of the dead mammoth, which the herd leader picks up; they bring the tusk to an Elephant Graveyard to mourn him.
• The Ruff & Reddy Show: The story arc of "Pinky the Pint-Sized Pachyderm" featured elephants who come to assist the heroes and Pinky while giving the villain Scary Harry Safari his just desserts.
• Silly Symphonies: In "Elmer Elephant", the title character is a heroic anthropomorphic elephant who saves his Love Interest Tilly Tiger from a fire.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In "Bedlam in the Big Top," Scooby gets an elephant at the circus to help Daphne snap out of a hypnotic trance. The elephant soaks up a trunk full of water and douses Daphne with it.
• ThunderCats (2011): The Elephants from the elephant village notably subvert the "Elephants Never Forget" stereotype, since while they're wise they also have very poor memories, which they are apparently infamous for. They're also pacifistic to the point that they prefer to solve their problems by meditating until the answer comes to them rather than act straight away. But that doesn't mean they're complete pushovers.
• Tom and Jerry: In "Jerry-Go-Round", an elephant loyally defends Jerry from Tom after Jerry pulls a nail from the elephant's foot. In the earlier "Jerry and Jumbo," Jerry paints a baby elephant (and later its mother) to look like him and royally troll Tom.
• Undercover Elephant is a dedicated but none-too-bright detective. He is assisted and sometimes hindered by Loudmouse.
• In The Wild Thornberrys, every elephant whom Eliza befriends has played this trope straight.
• Winnie-the-Pooh: Lumpy and his mother are both kind and heroic Heffalumps (elephant-like creatures) =- in stark contrast with the other, villainous and most likely imaginary Heffalumps of the rest of the franchise.
• Yogi Bear helps hide a runaway circus elephant from two cruel circus guards in "Hide and Go Peek."

Real Life

• The Oakland Athletics baseball team uses an elephant as its mascot, as well as one of its alternate names.
• Real elephants are used in Indian temple processions to carry gods, and some of them are sacred animals that bless devotees.
• Elephants are not really as noble-hearted as you might think for such intelligent organisms; adolescents have been known to kill rhinos and other animals for amusement.^Note Though it's now believed that such behaviors often stem from orphaned teenage gangs of elephants who have grown up without guidance from older elephants, essentially the pachyderm version of juvenile delinquents. It's become more common as poaching of elder, bigger-tusked elephants has increased. There are even claims that elephants occasionally indulge in necrophilia both with members of their species and with other creatures. On the other hand, they are social animals and do have something similar to human empathy, especially toward their fellows or young.
• Elephants are one of the few animals that display something akin to 'funerary rituals', like gently touching dead elephant heads with the trunk, or putting dirt and branches on them. They will still do this to elephant skulls after the carcass has decomposed to the bone, and they can apparently recognize them from the bones of other animals which don't elicit the same gestures.

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