What a great question! When it comes to physical pain (like the pain you would feel if you fell and skinned your knew) the answer is yes! Elephants have nerve endings just like people which send signals to their brain when something hurts. Elephants can have skin up to one inch thick (check out a ruler to see how thick that is!) but in some areas their skin is actually very thin and these areas are most sensitive to physical pain.

So what about emotional pain (the pain you might feel when a loved one passes away)? Unfortunately, I don´t have a very straightforward answer for this... The answer is we think so. Actually the question of whether or not elephants feel emotional pain is something that scientists have debated for many years. We do know that elephant are highly intelligent creatures. In fact the brain of an elephant is very similar to the brain of a human in terms of complexity.

Elephants also have a wide range of observable behaviors: elephants have behavior associated with grief, compassion, cooperation, memory, learning, playing, using tools and many more very complex behaviors. All of these things indicate that elephants are very smart animals! In general, highly intellectual animals are also emotional so it is very possible that elephants also feel emotional pain.