Howard Jacobson: Elephants are far too precious to suffer the indignity of being dressed in a rah-rah skirt

I wasn't morally certain about everything when I was 12 but I did know that it was a grievous wrong to put an elephant in a skirt. To my mind, Disney was indictable on a thousand counts - kitsch, cuteness, comicality, crimes against aesthetics, crimes against animal and human dignity, the trashing of the imaginations of children. But the crime of putting an elephant in a skirt was the most indictable of them all.

Whatever age I was when I read Shooting an Elephant, I found Orwell's description of the dying elephant so vivid and upsetting I recall it still whenever I see an elephant in a zoo or on television, or even simply when I encounter the word. Say "elephant" and there is the reluctant Orwell in his subdivisional policeman's outfit with his rifle in his hand; there is the Burmese crowd waiting to see what he will do, excited by the prospect of a kill, and there is the rogue elephant himself "suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old ... dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further".

It was that evocation of the elephant's remoteness - not simply the sadness of his bulk, the appearance of great age, or the agonised slowness of his dying, but the unknowableness of him - that helped me to grasp the real nature of Disney's offence. Sacrilege. It was sacrilege to make familiar what we have a moral, intellectual and even religious obligation to acknowledge as beyond our comprehension.

This week elephants have been in the news, a study undertaken by the University of Sussex and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants showing that they do indeed, as has been suspected, behave remarkably around the bodies of their dead. "Even if they find an elephant that is long dead, one where the hyenas have taken the stomach out, or even remains where the bones are scattered, they get tense and excited," writes Dr Karen McComb, co-author of the study.

Bearing in mind the dangers of anthropomorphism - of which Dumbo in a rah-rah skirt is the grossest example - we need to be wary of offering to know what "tense and excited" means as a description of emotions exhibited by an elephant. Tense and excited was how a cat of mine used to look when he masturbated in public, but I wouldn't presume to know from that what was going through his head, let alone stigmatise him as an exhibitionist or pervert. And an elephant is more mysterious than a cat.

"They often walk in a tight group up to the carcass," Dr McComb goes on. "They hold their ears out slightly, their heads up... They touch the carcass quite extensively with their trunks and smell it with a Hoovering motion. In the case of ivory they will wrap their trunks around it and carry it around."

We want to be touched by this, and doubtless we should be. It somehow makes a difference to the way we value grief in the human world to learn that elsewhere it appears to be felt and valued similarly. A lot rides for us on the idea that elephants are constant in their emotions. Nor does it count against them in our estimation that, without being contemptuous of them exactly, they demonstrate far less interest in the remains of other dead mammals. Indeed, it would seem to make them emotionally more refined - by our standards - that, in the matter of remains at least, they feel exclusively for their own. It appears to tell us something about love and loyalty that we want to hear.

So why, in that case, are we so hard on ourselves when we exhibit the same devotion to our own? The West cares more about its dead than it does about the dead from elsewhere - why should that be a surprise? Elsewhere reacts the same: we love our own, they love their own. Each man's death diminishes us and all that; but the truth is, some deaths diminish us more than others. Elephants poke about the bones of dead elephants as though they are discovering a lost part of themselves. And if we recognise that as a mark of exquisiteness of feeling, we should be kinder to ourselves when we do the same.

When Trevor Phillips spoke recently of the ghettos into which our society was dangerously dividing, we listened in alarm. Ghettos are not good places. But it can be a fine line that divides a ghetto from a neighbourhood, and, whatever the sinister implications of a ghetto, it answers to a necessity: we gather with our own because we love our own, because we share bones with them.

How to honour our own without dishonouring others remains the big question for us. Which is where elephants come in. Do they know something we don't? Elephant-watchers tell us that for all the interest they take in the remains of fellow elephants they are capable of showing great compassion to other stricken beasts, protecting them, even shielding them with their own bodies. We look into those seemingly sad, benign eyes and wonder what goes in there, in whatever dimension they inhabit.

It could be, however, that there is no lesson we can learn, beyond acknowledging that "world remote from us". Love the stranger, the Old Testament exhorts. But loving strangers is beyond us. Enough, maybe, just to venerate their strangeness.