Elephant cognition
Elephants manifest a wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, mimicry, playing, altruism, tool use, compassion, cooperation, self-awareness, memory, and communication.
[1][2][3] Recent evidence suggests that elephants may understand pointing, the ability to nonverbally communicate an object by extending a finger, or equivalent.
[8][11][12] Due to its higher cognitive intelligence and presence of family ties, researchers and wildlife experts argue that it is morally wrong for humans to kill them.
[7] Elephants also have a very large and highly convoluted hippocampus, a brain structure in the limbic system that is much bigger than that of any human, primate or cetacean.
This is thought to be possibly why elephants suffer from psychological flashbacks and the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The entire family of a dead matriarch, including her young calf, were all gently touching her body with their trunks, trying to lift her.
[23] Meredith also recalls an event told to him by George Adamson, a Kenyan game warden, regarding an old Turkana woman who fell asleep under a tree after losing her way home.
[42] George Adamson also recalls when he shot a bull elephant from a herd that kept breaking into the government gardens of northern Kenya.
[44] Kosik, an Indian elephant at Everland Amusement Park, South Korea can imitate up to five Korean words, including sit, no, yes and lie down.
[45] Kosik produces these human-like sounds by putting his trunk in his mouth and then shaking it while breathing out, similar to how people whistle with their fingers.
[46] Ecologist Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell conducted research in 1997 which concluded that elephants create low-frequency vibrations (seismic signals) through their trunks and feet to communicate across long distances.
[23] Asian elephants in India have been known to break electric fences using logs and clear the surrounding wires using their tusks to provide a safe passageway.
German evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch studied an elephant's ability to distinguish music, and in 1957 published the results in Scientific American.
Even though played on varying instruments and at different pitches, timbres and meters, she recognized the tones a year and a half later.
[58] An elephant named Shanthi at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. displayed the ability to play the harmonica and various horn instruments.
The orchestra was co-founded by pachyderm expert Richard Lair, who works at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang,[58] and David Sulzer (artist name, Dave Soldier) who studies the role of dopaminergic synapses in memory consolidation, learning, and behavior at Columbia University.
A 2010 experiment revealed that in order to reach food, "elephants can learn to coordinate with a partner in a task requiring two individuals to simultaneously pull two ends of the same rope to obtain a reward",[1][60] putting them on an equal footing with chimpanzees in terms of their level of cooperative skills.
[33] In another case, a female elephant worked out how she could unscrew iron rods with an eye hole that was an inch (2.5 cm) thick.
[63] Although it is common for herbivores to find salt licks or to ingest inorganic matter for sodium, elephants in the Mount Elgon National Park, Kenya, have learned to venture deep into Kitum Cave to utilize its minerals in what has been described as 'quarrying' and 'salt mining'.
Although the elephants clearly do not understand that they require salt in their diet, they show interest only in the cation-rich zeolite, tusking it into smaller edible fragments.
A sugarcane (a favorite elephant treat) is attached to the cord, and can only be retrieved by repeated, coordinated, action of the trunk and another body part.
All elephants seemed to be flexible about the use of anchor, interchangeably using mouth, foreleg, or both.Elephants have joined a small group of animals, including great apes, bottlenose dolphins and Eurasian magpies, that exhibit self-awareness.
Frans De Waal, who ran the study, stated, "These parallels between humans and elephants suggest a convergent cognitive evolution possibly related to complex society and cooperation.
"[70] There has been considerable debate over the issue of culling African elephants in South Africa's Kruger National Park as a means of controlling the population.
Some scientists and environmentalists argue that it is "unnecessary and inhumane" to cull them[71] since "elephants resemble humans in a number of ways, not least by having massive brains, social bonds that appear to be empathetic, long gestations, high intelligence, offspring that require an extended period of dependent care, and long life spans.
"[72]: 20824 A South African animal rights group asked in a statement anticipating the announcement, "How much like us do elephants have to be before killing them becomes murder?
[77] Because understanding something as simple as pulling a loop to open a door must occur rapidly or not at all, it should have induced, at some point during the repeated introductions of his animals into the box, a sudden reduction in escape time.
The actual, gradual, slope of the time-curve that he did observe suggested to him that his subjects failed to understand the cause-effect relationships between their actions and escape.
In 1957, researchers reported that a young Asian elephant needed 330 trials, over a period of several days, to consistently choose the reinforced response in her first discrimination task.
The pre-training that preceded these Myanmar discrimination experiments involved learning to remove a lid from a bucket or to displace a box to uncover a hole in the ground.
