Animal Intelligence
| Elephants are large, mysterious animals that we are only just now beginning to understand. New research has pointed out that some intelligence tests of the past did not show just how smart these animals are, and has led to calls for stopping the ivory trade, ending the confinement of elephants in zoos and even to extend them greater rights. |
People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully cataloged astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades.
In the past decade, 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.
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Despite the growing 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, sadly killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year.
Now more and more, 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.
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| Image Source - http://www.wildliferesearch.co.uk/Wildlife_Research/Elephants.html |
Ed Stewart, president and co-founder of Performing Animal Welfare Society (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?'
The Rights of Non-Human Persons program is also working to extend the protection of 'human rights' from our species to elephants and other creatures like great apes, dolphins and whales, and parrots.
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.
Researchers publishing in Current Biology have found that a group of African elephants living in captivity in Zimbabwe seem to be able to understand pointing naturally, showing an impressive ability to choose a bucket with food in it as opposed to an empty one when a human is pointing toward the chow. Moreover, the animals did not have to be trained by the researchers to perform the task. They picked the right bucket with the same frequency regardless of how many chances they’d had to practice the test.
Moreover, the elephant ability to manipulate their environment with their dexterous trunks makes them a close analog to humans with our hands. Such a combination of brains and volitional tools has been considered essential for advanced intelligence and is spurring on developments in artificial intelligence as well.
Graeme Shannon of the University of Sussex, has described how elephants in Kenya are able to distinguish between different languages – English, the language of tourists clicking cameras and Maa, the language of the Maasai warriors who occasionally kill elephants; and Swahili, generally safe. The elephants seemed anxious when someone spoke Maa; the moment she switched to Swahili, they became calm.
Animal psychologist Karen McComb, also from Sussex University, played back elephant sounds – the deep, gargling rumble they make – to discover how many individual voices one animal could recognize. She found they could distinguish more than 100. Research in Japan suggests they can count, too.
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 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.
However it is the empathy of elephants that stands out, that makes them seem so close to humans.
As George Orwell wrote in his essay, Shooting An Elephant,
"I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him."SOURCE Scientific American
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