extraordinary abilities of animals to perform feats of communication that we as
humans might find difficult to achieve or even fully comprehend.
Chapter 11
Intelligence
Earlier we defined intelligence as the “capacity to meet new and unforeseen
situations by rapid and effective adjustment of behavior.” While this definition
may serve to characterize intelligence, the challenge is how do you apply this
definition to an elephant and, as important, how do you evaluate the result? It
is difficult to determine what constitutes intelligence or intelligent behavior
without using human behavior as the standard (Byrne, 2006). The ability of
elephants to recognize and remember some 100 other individuals is not only
a mental feat that may not be matched by all humans but that recognition
by elephants is not the product of sight but of sound and enhanced by other
senses such as smell and touch. It is very likely that if humans were asked
to demonstrate their ability to recognize by sight more than 100 individuals
whom they have identified by sound, the result may fall far short of what
elephants can do.
We are faced with the additional problem of deciding the level of intelli-
gence involved in learning and the role that learning plays in any mental exer-
cise. The definition we quoted above attempts to eliminate the role of learning
by specifying that intelligence is the “capacity to meet new and unforeseen
situations” and to solve the potential problem by “rapid and effective adjust-
ment of behavior.” But if, as we have argued earlier, the brain has evolved
over evolutionary time to promote survival by adapting to the challenges of the
environment and to retain in its unconscious those strategies that have worked,
then how do we know that the problem that is designed to test the elephant’s
intelligence is, first, “new” and, second, of any relevance to the elephant? If
instead intelligence is the product of an infinite number of successful experi-
ments, determined over evolutionary time as a result of trial and error, then
there is no moment of discovery or capacity to meet a “new situation.” If most
of what we do and what an elephant does is embedded in the unconscious and
called upon by the conscious to act in any given situation, then it is not possible
to determine either what is “new and unforeseen” or what meets these demands
for an elephant. While knowledge is stored in the unconscious and is manifest
in behavior such as using the trunk to feed, that knowledge was initially con-
sciously learned before being stored in the unconscious. It would seem that
careful observation of elephant behavior under natural conditions would more
likely yield evidence of intelligent behavior.
Elephant Sense and Sensibility. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-802217-7.00011-9
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
79
80 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
Elephants can locate the source of sound with considerable accuracy. As
discussed in Chapter 9, one elephant can locate another by its call to a 1°
accuracy in azimuth at a distance of 2 km or greater. When hearing the ap-
proach of other elephants, again at distances of 2 km or greater, elephants will
frequently stand facing the direction of the oncoming elephants, with their
heads raised and the ears widespread. At other times, often with the approach
of a predator or even a much smaller animal such as a tortoise, an elephant
will straighten and point with its trunk. Prior to flight in a “fight-or-flight”
situation, the elephant that decides to flee points with its trunk the direction
it will take.
Smet and Byrne (2013) have recently demonstrated that African elephants,
trained to take tourists for rides, were able to follow humans pointing at food
in a container with an accuracy of 68%. One-year-old children only do slightly
better at an average of 73% of the time. The elephants Smet and Byrne worked
pointing by their handlers. In fact, they performed at the above level from the
beginning of the experiment and did not improve over the course of the experi-
ment. This suggests that the elephants were making use of an inherent ability
and not an acquired one.
When the experimenters only used subtle movement of the head and eyes to
indicate which of the vessels contained food, the elephants failed to respond. As
in the case of the mirror test (Chapter 8), it is surprising that elephants with poor
eyesight and heavy reliance upon sound and smell are able to respond to visual
cues. Conversely, it is not surprising that they probably failed to detect subtle
head and eye movement as cues to locate the food.
Hutto ( Illumination in the Flatwoods, 2006, p. 110) records that the young
wild turkeys he guided through the flatwoods of the northern Gulf coast of
Florida would respond to his pointing at an object or insect and readily know
where to look for the object.
Plotnik and colleagues (2011) reworked a classic 1930s experiment used on
primates to subject 12 male and female Asian elephants at the Thai Elephant
Conservation Center in Lampang, Thailand, to a challenging situation that none
of the elephants involved had previously encountered. A sliding table holding
bowls of corn was separated from the elephants by a transverse net. The table
had to be approached down two lanes, which led to the ends of ropes attached
to the sliding table. However, both ropes had to be pulled toward the net for
the sliding table to advance, bringing the bowls of corn within the reach of
the elephants. If only one rope was pulled, it would simply slide through two
rings without moving the table. The elephants quickly learned that the task had
to be coordinated. They would wait up to 45 s for a partner to show up. Two
elephants, Neua Un and Jo Jo, learned that it was not necessary for both of them
to pull on the rope. Neua Un simply stood on her end of the rope and allowed Jo
Jo to do the pulling. Furthermore, Jo Jo would not even walk up to the net unless
his partner was released to join him.
Intelligence Chapter | 11 81
This test not only involved comprehension of relatively complex mechan-
ics but required coordination between two individuals. As constructed, the task
could not be completed by a single individual. Once recognized, individuals did
not attempt to complete the task on their own but waited for help. In this experi-
ment the elephants went beyond their human task masters, finding a solution
that the humans had not thought of by one elephant standing on the rope.
Holdrege (2001) recounts an incident in India that illustrates both learning
as well as response to an unexpected situation. A work elephant had been taught
to pull a tall pole from a truck that the mahout and elephant were following and
place the pole upright in a previously prepared hole. The process proceeded
down the line of holes until the elephant refused to lower the pole from midair
above the next hole. The mahout got down from the elephant to find a dog sleep-
ing
in the bottom of the hole. Not until the dog was chased out of the hole would
the elephant lower the pole into it. Two levels of intelligence are evident in this
account. First, that the elephant is capable of learning and performing a task—
the planting of the poles—and, second, that the elephant was aware of what he
or she was doing. It was not acting purely by rote but perceived that with the
unexpected presence of the dog at the bottom of the hole, something bad was
likely to happen and that to avoid this, the elephant had to disobey commands
it had been following.
Poole and Granli (2004) have examined elephants less than 7 years old at
play. At this age the behavioral repertoire of elephants is still developing. For
example, they have yet to master the use of their trunk, which at this early stage
is seen as a rather useless appendage that is often in the way (even stepped
upon). Play may even imply cognitive recognition between reality and pretense.
They identified five categories of calf play that promoted motor skills, especially
with the trunk, and social skills that included rules and procedures in attaining
and maintaining rank and dominance. Extensive use of vocalization in play
developed later communication skills. Poole and Granli noted that elephants
engage in what can only be termed as absurd, even preposterous, solitary play.
In this kind of play there were many instances noted of “pure expressions of joy,
of fun and clowning around.” Such lone performances may be examples of self-
awareness in elephants. Collective play in groups, especially in water, promotes
social skills and sociability. Playing in water involves a lot of body contact and
close-quarter play (Figure 11.1).
Elephants frequently dig for water in dry stream beds in the dry season.
Both personal experience and that of Payne (personal communication, 1995)
suggest that elephants (usually the matriarch or an older adult female) seldom
dig for water without finding it. Furthermore, they locate water at a depth of
no more than about 1 m (3 ft). Digging in a sandy, dry riverbed, they scoop
the sand out with a front foot, cupping the foot to make a scoop. They do not
use their trunks in this digging operation. In many instances, water seeping into
the hole will take a number of minutes to accumulate and clarify. Members of the
herd will patiently wait their turn to drink, taking care not to collapse the hole,
82 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
FIGURE 11.1 Young elephants show an infinite variety of play from solitary to group play, involving running, mock charging of bushes and birds, great joy in water, and sometimes boisterous play that needs to be controlled by adults.
and will prevent and even assist young to drink from the hole (see Chapter 6).
Elephants have been seen to cover up these artificial waterholes with vegeta-
tion, preventing other animals from getting to the hole. When not protected
in this way, other animals, particularly Cape buffalo, wildebeest, and zebra,
quickly collapse and destroy the hole, often before a single animal has had the
opportunity to drink.
In at least one case reported by Holdrege (2001), an elephant, after digging
a hole in a sandy river bed to reach water, stripped bark from a nearby tree,
chewed it into a large ball, used the ball to plug the hole, and covered it with
sand. Later, this elephant was observed to return to the covered hole, remove the
sand and plug, and drink from the hole. The level of cognitive comprehension
in this case is remarkable. Not only must the elephant recognize why the hole
needs protection, presumably gained from previous experience, but he uses his
tusks as tools to manufacture a device to protect the source of water that he has
created and recognizes further that the protective device itself must be disguised
for his efforts to succeed. Whether or not these actions are interpreted in the
terms presented above cannot detract from the actual events that took place.
In a situation analogous to the account of sharing a small source of water
described earlier, a BBC film crew (17 March 2011) waiting at a stagnant water
hole for the annual flood to arrive in the Okavango, observed similar appar-
ently carefully considered behavior. The shallow water, only inches deep, cov-
ered a thick layer of mud and sediment. Any disturbance would sully the water,
making it unpalatable or even undrinkable. The filmmakers, like in the Wanki
case (see Chapter 12), anticipated that the approaching elephants, traveling in
Intelligence Chapter | 11 83
temperatures still near 50 °C (122 °F) after probably 24 h without water, would
rush into the water and destroy the precious source. Instead, the lead elephants
slowed the pace, approaching quietly and stepping into the pool carefully mak-
ing as little disturbance as possible; each elephant, one after another, “began to
carefully sweep their trunk tips across the surface, delicately siphoning the few
centimeters of clear liquid from the mud below.”
As before, the behavior exhibited by a group of animals ranging in age from
adults to calves suggests considerable exercise of knowledge, control, and disci-
pline. One would presume that experienced adults or at least the matriarch of the
herd would know from experience that to avail themselves of drinkable water
they had to, as a group, behave in the manner observed. Under normal circum-
stances elephants at a water hole will typically quite violently disturb the water.
In this case, however, they apparently recognized that this would not be appro-
priate. Instead, they adopted a completely different behavior. Such a change in
behavior implies considerable neural processing including the requirement that
such change in behavior had to be communicated to the entire herd.
Elephants are fully aware of an electric fence and in Etosha (Conrad Brain,
personal communication, 1999) seem to know when the fence is on or off. While
the solenoids in the electric fence control box emit quite loud clicks when the
fence is on, these clicks cannot be heard over long distances away from the box.
Elephants nevertheless detect whether the fence is on or not. Whether they do
this by detecting the electric field or touching vegetation is not known.
When the electric fence is on, elephants have been seen to break sizable tree
limbs or branches, which they have then thrown onto the fence and effectively
disabled the fence by shorting it to the ground. Larger females have been seen to
push younger elephants into the fence to achieve the same ends. Alternatively,
a mother elephant was seen to twist the conducting wire around her tusk and
break it to let her calf through. In the first instance, the tree limbs are being
effectively used as tools to disable the electric fence. In the second instance, an-
other elephant is employed as perhaps the only, if not the most readily, available
tool. Likewise, the tusk is being employed as a tool.
Hot chilies have been used as a barrier to protect crops from elephants in var-
ious locations. As reported by Edwin Mbulo ( Sunday Post Online, 29 January
2012), elephants in the Mandia region along the Zambezi River soon learned
to deal with the chili barrier
. Cloth strips were soaked in chili extract and hung
around the perimeter fences of the crops the villagers wished to protect from the
elephant raiders. The elephants not only used branches to throw onto the fences
and bring down the chili strips, but walked backward across the downed barrier,
presumably to avoid getting chili on sensitive trunk tips, eyes, and mouth.
Anthony and Spence in their book The Elephant Whisperer (2009, p. 242)
relates the capture of 12 Nyala antelope ( Tragelaphus angasi) (Figure 11.2).
The male Nyala are a beautiful black, golden brown, and white striped ante-
lope with 30-in. lyre-shaped horns, weighing in at between 250 and 300 lbs and
standing nearly 1.3 m (4 ft) at the shoulder. The females are smaller, golden
84 Elephant Sense and Sensibility
FIGURE 11.2 Family of Nyala ( Tragelaphus angasi) with one male and four females. Photograph courtesy of author.
brown with vertical white stripes, and no horns. The species has been decimated
everywhere in South Africa except the Natal region where Anthony’s “Thula
Thula” game farm was located. He had set up a capture of Nyala for transloca-
tion to one of their old habitats. The capture had been successful and 12 Nyala
were safely fenced in an impregnable thorn bush boma. The capture team was
seated around their campfire next to the boma enjoying their last night of a suc-
cessful capture operation. Then they heard the sound of Thula Thula’s herd of
elephants led by the matriarch Nana. The team gave way thinking that the el-
ephants had been attracted by the smell of the bales of alfalfa that they had been
using to feed the Nyala. Clearly, if the elephants wanted the alfalfa they could
have it. Instead, the herd stopped as if on instruction. Nana walked deliberately
and alone to the boma gate, which was not locked but secured only by closing
the hasps on the u-bolts. She manipulated the hasps with the tip of her trunk,
first getting one then the other open. Then with her trunk she pulled the gate
open, stood aside, and waited. After a few seconds the Nyala responded, found
the opening, and were gone. As the last Nyala disappeared, Nana went back to
the herd and led them away. They showed no interest in the alfalfa, leaving this