Yes
elephants are smart and they retain a capacity we have actually lost. Mind to mind communication. I suspect that they share their culture in
this manner. As I have recently reported
I do know of one confirmed instance of mind to mind verbal transmission and visual
transmission.
I
suspect that they compete well on a level of a natural human at least without
the advantage of many choices when it comes to tools. Solve that somehow and we will likely be
shocked.
What this
does mean is that the elephant is on the way to been treated as a co-sentient
on Earth and that we will start to cooperate.
That will also turn out to be mutually profitable once real time communication
takes off.
The Science Is In: Elephants Are Even Smarter Than We Realized [Video]
We now have
solid evidence that elephants are some of the most intelligent, social and
empathic animals around—so how can we justify keeping them in captivity?
Feb 26, 2014 |By
Ferris Jabr
One day in
2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled
something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly
suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe
and honeydew. Stretching out his trunk, he managed to get the fruit and break
off a piece of the branch, but the rest of the tasty leaves remained
tantalizingly out of reach. Without hesitation he marched straight to a large
plastic cube in the yard, rolled it just beneath the hovering bamboo and used
it as a step stool to pull the whole branch to the ground. Seven-year-old
Kandula had never before interacted with a cube in this manner. Determined to
satisfy his stomach and his curiosity, he did something scientists did not know
elephants could do: he had an aha moment.
A couple weeks
earlier a team of researchers led by Diana Reiss and Preston Foerder, then at
City University New York, had visited Kandula’s home at the National Zoo in
Washington D.C. They placed sticks and sturdy cubes around the yard and strung
a kind of pulley system similar to a laundry line between the roof of the
elephant house and a tree. From the cable they dangled fruit-tipped bamboo
branches of various lengths both within and without of Kandula’s reach. After
preparing the aerial snacks they retreated out of sight, turned on a camera and
waited to see what the young elephant would do. It took several days for
Kandula to achieve his initial insight, but after that he repeatedly positioned
and stood on the cube to wrap his trunk around food wherever the scientists
suspended it; he learned to do the same with a tractor tire; and he even
figured out how to stack giant butcher blocks to extend his reach.
Other elephants
had failed similar tests in the past. As it turns out, however,
those earlier studies were not so much a failure of the elephant mind as the
human one. Unlike people and chimpanzees, elephants rely far more on their
exquisite senses of smell and touch than on their relatively poor vision,
especially when it comes to food. Previously, researchers had offered elephants
only sticks as potential tools to reach dangling or distant treats—a strategy
at which chimps excel. But picking up a stick blunts an elephant’s sense of
smell and prevents the animal from feeling and manipulating the desired morsel
with the tip of its dexterous trunk. Asking an elephant to reach for a piece of
food with a stick is like asking a blindfolded man to locate and open a door
with his ear. “We are always looking at animals through our human lens—it’s
hard not to,” Reiss says. “But now we have an increased appreciation of diverse
thinking creatures all around us because of so much research on so many
species. It’s fascinating to try and find ways of testing animal minds so they
can show us what they are really capable of.”
People have
been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years
and scientists have carefully catalogued astounding examples of elephant
cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however,
researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As
few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments
showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the
animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving.
Because of recent experiments designed with the elephant’s perspective in mind,
scientists now have solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they
are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are
highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a
sense of self.
Despite the
sharpened awareness of elephant sentience, many zoos around the world continue
to maintain or expand their elephant exhibits and increasing numbers of heavily
armed poachers are descending on Africa to meet the soaring demand for ivory,
killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year. The U.S. recently banned ivory trade, with some exceptions, but there
have been no steps toward outlawing elephant captivity. At least a few zoos are
using the latest science to transform their elephant enclosures, giving the
animals more room to roam as well as intellectually stimulating puzzles. Only
some zoos can afford to make such changes, however, and many elephant experts
maintain that, given everything we know about the creatures’ mental lives,
continuing to keep any of them locked up is inexcusable.
Mental mettle
The modern elephant mind emerged from an evolutionary history that has much in common with our own. The African bush and forest elephants, the Asian elephant, and their extinct relatives, the mammoths, all began to assume their recognizable forms between three and five million years ago in Africa. As Louis Irwin of The University of Texas at El Paso explains, both humans and elephants adapted themselves to life in Africa's forests and savannas around the same time, emigrating to Europe and Asia; both evolved to live long and often migratory lives in highly complex societies; both developed intricate systems of communication; and both experienced a dramatic increase in brain size.
Over the years
numerous observations of wild elephants suggested that the big-brained beasts
were some of the most intelligent animals on the planet. They remembered the
locations of water holes hundreds of kilometers apart, returning to them year
after year. They fashioned twigs into switches to shoo flies and plugged
drinking holes with chewed up balls of bark. They clearly formed strong social
bonds and even seemed to mourn their dead (see “When Animals Mourn” in the July 2013 issue of Scientific American). Yet scientists
rarely investigated this ostensibly immense intellect in carefully managed
experiments. Instead, researchers looking for evidence of exceptional mental
aptitude in nonhuman animals first turned to chimpanzees and, later, to brainy
birds like ravens, crows and some parrots. Only in the past 10 years have
scientists rigorously tested elephant cognition. Again and again these new
studies have corroborated what zoologists inferred from behavior in the wild.
Scientists
living among herds of wild elephants have long observed awe-inspiring
cooperation between family members. Related elephant mothers and their children
stay together throughout life in tight-knit clans, caring for one another’s
children and forming protective circles around calves when threatened by lions
or poachers. Elephant clan members talk to one another with a combination of
gentle chirps, thunderous trumpets and low-frequency rumbles undetectable to
humans, as well as nudges, kicks and visual signals such as a tilt of the head
or flap of the ear. They deliberate among themselves, make group decisions and
applaud their achievements. “Being part of an elephant family is all about
unity and working together for the greater good,” says Joyce Poole, one of the
world’s foremost elephant experts and co-founder of the charity ElephantVoices,
which promotes the study and ethical care of elephants. “When they are getting
ready to do a group charge, for example, they all look to one another: ‘Are we
all together? Are we ready to do this?’ When they succeed, they have an
enormous celebration, trumpeting, rumbling, lifting their heads high, clanking
tusks together, intertwining their trunks.”
Cynthia Moss,
director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and another preeminent elephant
researcher, once saw a particularly amazing example of elephant cooperation.
One day the young and audacious Ebony, daughter of a matriarch named Echo,
bounded right into the midst of a clan that was not her own. As a show of
dominance, that clan kidnapped Ebony, keeping her captive with their trunks and
legs. After failing to retrieve Ebony on their own, Echo and her eldest
daughters retreated. A few minutes later they returned with all the members of
their extended family, charged into the clan of kidnappers and rescued Ebony.
“That took forethought, teamwork and problem-solving,” Moss says. “How did Echo
convey that she needed them? It's a mystery to me, but it happened.”
In 2010 Joshua
Plotnik of Mahidol University in Thailand and his colleagues tested elephant
cooperation in a controlled study for the first time. At a Thai conservation
center, they divided an outdoor elephant enclosure into two regions with a
volleyball net. On one side stood pairs of Asian elephants. On the other side
the researchers attached two bowls of corn to a table that slid back and forth
on a frame of plastic pipes. They looped a hemp rope around the table so that
when both ends of the rope were pulled simultaneously the table moved toward
the elephants, pushing the food underneath the net. If a single elephant tried
to pull the rope by him or herself, it would slip out and ruin any chance of
getting the food. All the elephants quickly learned to cooperate and even to
patiently wait for a partner if the scientists prevented both animals from
reaching the rope at the same time. One mischievous young elephant outsmarted
the rest. Instead of going through the hassle of tugging on one end of the
rope, she simply stood on it and let her partner do all the hard work.
Some scientists
studying wild elephants have argued that, in addition to cooperating for
survival’s sake, the creatures are capable of genuine empathy. Poole recalls,
for example, one elephant flinching as another stretched her trunk towards an
electric fence; it was fortunately inactive at the time but had been live in
the past. Elephants often refuse to leave their sick and injured behind, even
if the ailing animal is not a direct relative. Poole once observed three
young male elephants struggle to revive a dying matriarch, lifting her body
with their tusks to get her back on her feet. Another time, while driving
through Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, Poole saw a female elephant give birth
to a stillborn baby. The mother guarded her dead calf for two days, trying over
and over to revive its limp body. Realizing that the grieving mom had not had
any sustenance this whole time, Poole drove near her with an offering of water.
The elephant stretched her trunk inside the car and eagerly drank her fill.
When she was done, she remained with Poole for a few moments, gently touching
her chest.
When elephants
encounter an elephant skeleton, they slow down, approach it cautiously, and
caress the bones with their trunk and the bottoms of their sensitive
padded feet. Elephants do not show the same interest in the remains of other
species. In one experiment elephants spent twice as much time
investigating an elephant skull as those of either a rhinoceros and buffalo and
six times longer probing ivory than a piece of wood. Moss has witnessed
elephants kicking dirt over skeletons and covering them with palm fronds.
Plotnik and
renowned animal behavior expert Frans de Waal of Emory University recently teamed up to study
elephant empathy. On a monthly basis between the spring of 2008 and 2009 they
observed 26 Asian elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, looking
for signs of what researchers call “consolation.” Many animals are capable
“reconciliation”—making up after a tussle. Far fewer animals display true consolation:
when a bystander goes out of his or her way to comfort the victim of a fight or
an individual that is disturbed for some reason. On dozens of occasions Plotnik
and de Waal saw elephants consoling one another. A perturbed elephant often
perks up its ears and tail and squeals, roars or trumpets. Over the course of
the study, many elephants behaved in this way, because of an altercation,
because they were spooked by something—such as a helicopter or dog—or for an
unknown cause. When other elephants recognized these signs of anxiety, they
rushed to the upset animal’s side, chirping softly and stroking their fellow
elephant’s head and genitals. Sometimes the elephants put their trunks in one
another’s mouths—a sign of trust because doing so risks being bitten.
The aspect of
elephant intelligence that is the trickiest to gauge—the one that has really
challenged scientists to think like an elephant—is self-awareness. Scientists
now have preliminary evidence that elephants are indeed self-aware, overturning
previous findings. To determine whether an animal has a sense of self,
researchers first place a mark on an animal’s body that it can identify only
with the help of a mirror. Then they wait to see if the animal tries to get rid
of the mark when it encounters its reflection. Doing so, the reasoning goes,
means the animal understands when it is looking at itself rather than another
animal. In the earliest studies on elephant self-awareness, researchers placed
a one by 2.5–meter mirror outside the bars of an enclosure, angled in such a
way that the animals could see only the upper thirds of their bodies. The
elephants reacted to the reflection as they would to another elephant, raising
their trunks in greeting. When the scientists dabbed the elephants’ faces with
white cream, the animals failed to recognize that the marks were on their own
bodies.
But what if the
experimental design itself prevented the elephants from understanding that they
were looking at themselves in the mirror? After all, elephants identify one
another primarily by touch, scent and sound—not sight—and the animals in the
study could not physically investigate the mirror. So Reiss, de Waal and
Plotnik decided to redo these experiments, this time allowing the elephants to
use all their senses.
In 2005 the
trio constructed a 2.5 by 2.5–meter shatterproof mirror and bolted it to a wall
surrounding an elephant yard at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. Three female
Asian elephants named Patty, Maxine and Happy were free to approach and inspect
the sturdy mirror at their leisure. When they first encountered the
contraption, Maxine and Patty swung their trunks over it and attempted to scale
the wall to which it was attached, as though checking to see whether another
elephant was hiding behind the glass. When they found nothing, all three
elephants swayed their trunks and bobbed their heads while looking right into
the mirror, just as we might wave our hands to see whether a shadow is our own.
They stared at their reflection and stuck their trunks inside their mouths as
though searching for snagged spinach.
A few days
later the scientists painted a white X onto the right side of each elephant’s
face. Maxine and Patty did not seem to notice the marks, but Happy began to
touch the X on her face with her trunk after strolling past the mirror a few
times. Eventually she faced her reflection and repeatedly swiped at the painted part of her face with the tip
of her trunk.
The fact that
only one of three elephants noticed the X on its face might seem a
disappointing performance, but it is actually quite remarkable. Reiss points
out that even in studies with chimpanzees—which most researchers accept are
self-aware—sometimes fewer than half pass the mirror test. Plotnik argues that
expecting elephants to pay attention to a random blotch on their face may not
have been the best test of their self-awareness anyhow. Whereas chimpanzees are
fastidious groomers that spend hours picking nits and gnats out of one
another’s hair, elephants stay clean by getting dirty, routinely spraying
themselves with dust and dirt to deter insects and parasites. And they love to
galumph in mud. “There’s no reason to think elephants would have same kind of
vanity," Plotnik says.
Brains behind
bars
All the new evidence of elephant intelligence has intensified the debate about whether to continue keeping the creatures in captivity. Former elephant caretaker Dan Koehl maintains a thorough database of elephants around the world. He has records of 7,828 elephants currently in captivity: 1,654 in zoos or safari parks; 4,549 in "elephant camps" where tourists can ride the animals; 288 in circuses; and the remaining in temples, sanctuaries or private residences. The latest research on the well-being of U.S. zoo elephants is not particularly encouraging. With mny collaborators, animal welfare expert and Vistalogic, Inc., consultant Cheryl Meehan recently completed a gint study on nearly all of the 300 or so elephants in North American zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The researchers assessed the physical and mental health of captive elephants with a combination of photographs, videos, blood and hormone tests, veterinary reports, and surveys filled out by caretakers: about 75 percent of the elephants were overweight or obese; between 25 and 40 percent had foot or joint problems of some kind depending on the year; and 80 percent displayed behavioral tics, such as pacing and continual head bobbing or swaying.
Stephen Harris
of the University of Bristol and his colleagues conducted a similar study on U.K. zoo elephants in the late 2000s. I
asked him whether it is possible to keep an elephant physically and mentally
healthy in a zoo. His answer was succinct: “No.” The elephants he studied spent
up to 83 percent of their time indoors, often in cramped conditions; the
majority had abnormal gaits; 75 percent were overweight; more than 50 percent
had behavioral tics; and one individual displayed tics for 14 hours in a single
day. Captive elephants also have higher rates of infertility and die younger on
average than their uncaged counterparts. Whereas wild elephants migrate great
distances through the forest or savanna in search of food and water—eating huge
amounts of tough, fibrous grasses and shrubs that are difficult to digest—zoo
elephants spend too many hours standing idle on concrete and consume
calorie-rich foods they would rarely encounter in their native habitat.
Researchers have also learned that many zoo elephants do not get the rest they
need because they do not like to lie down and sleep on stone or other hard
surfaces.
Few zoos can
adequately re-create the complex social life of wild elephants. Female
elephants in captivity are often strangers acquired from here and there. Any
friendships that do form can dissolve in an instant when a zoo decides to
relocate an animal. “Sometimes people treat these creatures like furniture,”
Moss says. Researchers used to think that male elephants, which leave their
clans in young adulthood, were loners. They now know, however, that male
elephants socialize extensively with one another. Yet zoos mix males and
females in ways that would never occur in the wild and try to offload adult
males if they become too cantankerous or lustful.
Now that the
evidence of the elephant’s intellect and emotional life is no longer
mostly anecdotal the zoological community faces even more pressure to answer a
daunting question: Why keep elephants in captivity at all? Zoos usually give
two main reasons: to rescue elephants from dire situations, such as the threat
of poachers or the stress of living in so-called rehabilitation centers in Asia
that keep the creatures leashed to trees; and to teach the public how amazing
elephants are, in hopes of promoting their conservation.
These arguments
have become increasingly tenuous over time. Few elephants in zoos today were
rescued from an awful life; instead they were born in captivity. In the
mid-2000s zoos embarked on an especially aggressive captive elephant breeding
program, trying to compensate for all the animals they had lost to disease and
frailty. "For every elephant born in a zoo, on average another two
die," concluded a comprehensive 2012 investigative report by The
Seattle Times. As for educational outreach, modern technology has
rendered zoos obsolete. “When I was a kid we had no television and even when we
did wildlife images were very few,” Harris says. “You went to the zoo to
interact with elephants, to ride on them and touch them—there was no other way
to get a sense of them. Now of course there’s an information overload. You can get
a sense of scale and see all kinds of wonderful behaviors from photography and
films that you would never see in captivity.” Consider how much one can learn
from vivid scenes of wild elephants in a nature documentary of Planet Earth caliber compared with
the experience of staring at an arthritic bobble-headed zoo elephant.
Other
scientists think that, even if there are few good reasons to keep elephants in
zoos in the first place, arguing for an abrupt end to elephant captivity is
naive and idealistic, especially outside North America and Europe. “Although I
believe all elephants should be wild, unfortunately that is not
realistic," Plotnik says. In Asia, where he works, people have been using
elephants as beasts of burden for centuries and currently have thousands of the
animals captive in camps. Suddenly releasing all those animals is simply not
feasible; there may not even be enough wild habitat left to accommodate them
all. Plotnik thinks the best way forward is maintaining the wild Asian elephant
population through conservation and slowly phasing out the captive one by
finding new, equally lucrative jobs for elephant caretakers. Moss wants
something similar for elephants in zoos in the U.S. and Europe: “I would like
to see them live out their lives and have no more breeding or importation.”
Meehan hopes the kind of information she has collected will help improve the
well-being of zoo elephants.
In recent years
at least a few zoos have been trying to use animal welfare science to make
their elephant enclosures more like sanctuaries. The Oregon Zoo in Portland is
close to remodeling its elephant habitat in a way it claims will improve the
livelihood of its four male and four female Asian elephants. Elephant Lands,
set to open in 2015, is a hilly 2.5-hectare habitat covered mostly in deep sand
rather than concrete and featuring a 490,000-liter pool for wallowing, bathing
and playing. Elephants will be free to roam from one part of the terrain to
another, explains elephant curator Bob Lee, which should hopefully allow males
and females to interact as they choose. Various feeding machines will provide
elephants with food at random intervals, because studies have linked such unpredictability
to healthier body weights. Other feeders will exercise the elephants’ trunks
and brains with out-of-reach snacks and mechanical puzzles.
Refurbishing
elephant enclosures so they are roomier and more intellectually stimulating is
at once an acknowledgment and dismissal of the research on elephant
intelligence and welfare. After all, if the zoos really have the animals’ best
interests at heart, they would close their elephant exhibits. In 2005 the
Detroit Zoo became the first to give up its elephants solely on ethical
grounds. Spending so much time in close quarters—and waiting out the harsh
Michigan winters indoors—left their two Asian elephants physically and mentally
ill. Wanda and Winky were moved to the Performing Animal Welfare Society's (PAWS)
930-hectare sanctuary in San Andreas, Calif. A handful of zoos have followed
suit, but they are in the minority.
Ed Stewart,
president and co-founder of PAWS, thinks that even his massive haven is not
adequate to keep the elephants as healthy as they would be in the wild.
"Elephants should not be in captivity— period," he says. "It
doesn’t matter if it’s a zoo, a circus or a sanctuary. The social structure
isn't correct, the space is not right, the climate is not right, the food is not
right. You can never do enough to match the wild. They are unbelievably
intelligent. With all of that brainpower—to be as limited as they are in
captivity—it's a wonder they cope at all. In 20 years I hope we will look back
and think, 'Can you believe we ever kept those animals in cages?'"
2 comments:
https://www.facebook.com/weirdtalesmagazine/photos/a.292422230933.183503.215132280933/10152422632950934/?type=1
I just had to offer this. Not to do so would have been dereliction of a moral, ethical and spiritual duty! ;)
Enjoy.
DC Treybil
https://www.facebook.com/weirdtalesmagazine/photos/a.292422230933.183503.215132280933/10152422632950934/?type=1
I just had to offer this. Not to do so would have been dereliction of a moral, ethical and spiritual duty! ;)
Enjoy.
DC Treybil
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