Pepsi was the star of a recent study on Asian elephants. The adolescent bull passed a mirror test conducted by Joshua Plotnik by carefully touching a large white X that had been painted on the left-hand side of his forehead. He never paid attention to the X that had been put with invisible paint on the right-hand side; nor did he touch the white one until he walked up to the mirror in the middle of a meadow. The next day we reversed the sides of the visible and invisible markings, and Pepsi again specifically felt the white X. He rubbed off some of the paint with the tip of his trunk and brought it to his mouth, tasting it. Since he could know its location only via his reflection, he must have connected his mirror image with himself. As if to make the point that the mark test isn’t the only way to do so, Pepsi took one step back at the end of testing to open his mouth wide. With the mirror’s help, he peered deeply inside. This move, also common in apes, makes perfect sense given that one never gets to see one’s own tongue and teeth without a mirror.1
Years later Pepsi towered over me as a nearly adult male. He was very gentle, though, lifting me up and putting me down on the orders of his mahout. Revisiting Thailand to see the camp in the Golden Triangle, where the Think Elephants International Foundation conducts its research, I met Josh’s team of enthusiastic young assistants. Every day they invite a couple of elephants to their experiments. With a mahout sitting high up on their neck, the colossal animals lumber to the testing site on the jungle’s edge. After the mahout gets off to squat in the background, the elephant performs a few simple tasks. She feels an object with her trunk, after which she is asked to pick a matching one from among several; or she stretches her trunk to smell the difference between two buckets depending on what the students put into them.2
A marked Asian elephant in front of a mirror. The mark test requires an individual to connect her reflection with her own body, resulting in inspection of the mark. Only a handful of species pass this test spontaneously.
Everyone knows that elephants are smart, but there is an enormous scarcity of data similar to those for primates, corvids, dogs, rats, dolphins, and so on. All we have for the elephant is spontaneous behavior, which doesn’t allow for the precision and controls that science desires. Discrimination tasks like the ones I witnessed are an excellent starting point. But even if the pachyderm mind may be the next frontier in evolutionary cognition, it is a most challenging one given that the elephant is probably the only land animal never to be seen alive on a university campus or in a conventional lab. While science’s preference for easy-to-keep species is understandable, it has its limits. It has given us a small-brain perspective on animal cognition, one that we have had trouble shedding.
Elephants Listening
Southeast Asians have a long-standing cultural relation with elephants. For thousands of years, these animals have carried out heavy forest work, transported royalty, and served in hunting and warfare. They have always remained wild, though. The species is not domesticated in the genetic sense, and free-ranging elephants still often sire the offspring of captive ones. Not surprisingly, elephants are less predictable than many domesticated animals. They can be hostile to people, occasionally killing a mahout or tourist, but many of them also form lifelong bonds with their caretakers. In one story, an elephant at the age of ten pulled her drowning mahout out of a lake after hearing his cries for help a kilometer away; in another, a fully grown bull would charge anyone who came close except the wife of the village elder, whom he would caress with his trunk. Young elephants grow so used to people that they learn how to fool them by stuffing a trunkful of grass into the wooden bells around their necks so as to muffle their sound. This way they can move about unnoticed.
African elephants, in contrast, are rarely brought under human control. They live their own parallel lives, even though the massive ivory trade is now putting them in danger to the point that we face the dismaying prospect of permanently losing one of the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals. The elephant’s Umwelt being largely acoustic and olfactory, the protection of wild populations against poaching and conflict with humans requires methods that are not immediately obvious to our visual species. Studies focus on the extraordinary senses of these animals. One study, in arid Namibia, followed free-ranging elephants equipped with GPS collars. It discovered that these animals are aware of thunderstorms at enormous distances and adjust their travel routes to precipitation days before it actually arrives. How do they do this? Elephants can hear infrasound, which are sound waves far below the human hearing range. Also used in communication, these sounds travel over much longer distances than the ones we are able to discern.3 Is it possible that elephants can hear thunder and rainfall hundreds of miles away? It seems the only way to explain their behavior.
But isn’t this just a matter of perception? Cognition and perception cannot be separated, though. They go hand in hand. As the father of cognitive psychology, Ulric Neisser, put it: “the world of experience is produced by the man who experiences it.”4 Since the late Neisser was a colleague of mine, I know that nonhuman minds were not his foremost interest, yet he refused to view animals as mere learning machines. The behaviorist program was ill suited to all species, he felt, not just ours. Instead, he emphasized perception and how it is turned into experience by picking and choosing what sensory input to pay attention to and how to process and organize it. Reality is a mental construct. This is what makes the elephant, the bat, the dolphin, the octopus, and the star-nosed mole so intriguing. They have senses that we either don’t have, or that we have in a much less developed form, making the way they relate to their environment impossible for us to fathom. They construct their own realities. We may attach less significance to these, simply because they are so alien, but they are obviously all-important to these animals. Even when they process information familiar to us, they may do so quite differently, such as when elephants tell human languages apart. This ability was first demonstrated in African elephants.