You may have seen them painting appealingly abstract images with their trunks for the amusement of tourists in countries like Thailand, demonstrating an artistic sensibility of sorts. That’s a gimmick, yes, but there’s no denying that Asian elephants are highly intelligent creatures.
In fact, they may be even more intelligent than we thought.
According to a team of scientists in Japan, Asian elephants are the math whizzes of the animal kingdom. Many animals are known to have the ability to count, but they usually do so not with absolute numbers but with approximate quantities. Asian elephants, however, seem to posses an understanding of actual numbers much the same way we do.
The Japanese researchers trained three elephants to touch numerical figures on a jumbo-sized touchscreen panel with the tip of their trunk. The numbers of items in each figure ranged from 0 to 10 and were represented by fruits. One elephant, a 14-year-old female called Authai, managed to perform the task with flying colors, demonstrating that she could accurately judge relative quantities.
“We found that her performance was unaffected by distance, magnitude, or the ratios of the presented numerosities but, consistent with observations of human counting, she required a longer time to respond to comparisons with smaller distances,” the researchers write. “This study provides the first experimental evidence that nonhuman animals have cognitive characteristics partially identical to human counting.”
On the screen Authai had to compare two images with different amounts of fruit from zero to 10 and tick the box with the larger number of fruits in it. The female elephants correctly pinpointed the greater number of fruits 181 times out of 271 trials, which is to say two-thirds of the time. The researchers believe this is clear evidence of superior cognitive abilities in Asian elephants when it comes to counting.
Sadly, however, these majestic, intelligent pachyderms are often reduced to serving as the playthings of tourists by being chain-ganged into carrying people on their backs. They are also facing hardships in the wild with their habitats becoming increasingly diminished and fragmented. In some countries like Myanmar (formerly Burma), they continue to poached relentlessly for their tusks, ivory and other bodyparts.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, dozens of wild elephants have been killed and stripped of their skins by poachers in the past few years within the south of Myanmar, including the Irrawaddy Delta, where wild elephants still roam but where a long-simmering civil war with ethnic minorities and a lack of law enforcement facilitate growing impunity among poachers. Many locals believe that the skins of elephants can cure a variety of ailments such as eczema.
“There are fewer than 50,000 Asian elephants left in the wild, and fewer than 2,000 in Myanmar,” WWF notes. “For decades, they’ve faced the threats of habitat loss, human-elephant conflict, and, to a lesser extent, poaching. But poaching for body parts other than tusks (only male Asian elephants grow tusks, and only 1% of male elephants in Myanmar have tusks) is on the rise.”
Here’s hoping Asia’s beleaguered numerically gifted elephants can count on us to save them.
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