Elephant Intelligence: Why Elephants Might Be as Smart as Humans

With increased loss of habitat, destruction of migration paths, and poaching by humans, it's no wonder elephant attacks are on the rise. Scientists studying why groups of elephants have become hostile and perhaps depressed have also discovered quite a bit about elephant intelligence. The notion that elephants might be as smart as humans is a relatively new one, putting elephants on par with other sophisticated animals like dolphins.

Here are some of the reasons elephants may be even smarter than we thought:

Elephants use tools.

Like primates, elephant calves will play with objects found in their natural environment. Elephants' use of objects goes beyond playfulness and curiosity, though. Elephants use sticks to scratch themselves, shoo away flies, and intimidate enemies. In captivity, elephants have used large rocks to short circuit electric fences.

Elephants mourn their dead.

When a member of an elephant herd dies, the other elephants will gather around and touch the body with their trunks. They will watch over the body and make mournful-sounding noises for several days, only leaving the deceased for food. Strangely, elephants perform the same act of ritual mourning for humans as well.

When people joke that an elephant never forgets, they probably don't realize the extent of an elephant's memory. Elephants are migratory animals, walking hundred of miles of grassland every year. When an elephant herd walks over a spot in which a family member died, they will collectively pause and exhibit signs of mourning. When there are bones left, they will also touch the bones with their trunks.

Elephants communicate on many levels.

One way to gauge animal intelligence is by the complexity of their communication. Elephants communicate like other animals both verbally and with body language. But elephants can hear at a much lower frequency than humans, and also sense vibrations with their hyper-sensitive feet from miles away.

Because of this adaptation, elephants vocalize in two ways. They vocalize the way we understand vocalization, by creating sound waves that travel through the air. The low-frequency noises that elephants make also make seismic "noise" that travels as a vibration in the ground. So elephants are capable of "hearing" over great distances by picking up on the rumbling under their feet.

Elephants retain cultural memory.

One of the strongest cases for elephant intelligence comes from the idea of elephants sharing a taught, collective culture. Scientists have studied and compared the behavior of wild elephants that have been hunted by humans and wild elephants that have not been hunted. The elephant herds that had never historically been hunted display no fear of humans, and react to human presence in a friendly and curious manner. Elephant herds that had been hunted displayed fear of humans.

One particularly interesting study deals with an elephant herd that had been almost poached to death by a hired hunter. The few remaining elephants retreated to the forest, adopted a nocturnal lifestyle, and shied away from all human contact. They have not been hunted since. Three generations of elephants later and with none of the original herd remaining, the descendants of this particular herd exhibit the same fearful, nocturnal behavior. Researchers believe the mother elephants are teaching survival tactics to their calves that don't align with any other elephant herd's behavioral patterns based on the herd's shared history.

Elephants are self-aware.

Have you ever tried to get your cat to look at itself in the mirror or watched a pet parakeet try to feed its reflected image? Animals tend to be pretty dense about recognizing themselves, or even understanding that they project an image into the world.

The strongest case for elephant intelligence is that elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, indicating they have a high sense of self-awareness. An elephant with a smudge on its face will try to rub it off when it sees the smudge in the mirror.

Conclusion:

Elephants are large, mysterious animals humans are only just now beginning to understand. Attempts to gauge elephant intelligence by human criteria might seem strange to an elephant, although we share a few key cultural practices.

While examining behavior can give us a way to measure intelligence, we have to look at biology as well. Elephant brains are born at 35% their adult weight, compared to 28% for humans. Scientists estimate that the elephant brain grows for about ten years, giving elephants an enormous amount of time to acquire knowledge. Like humans, elephants might depend more on learned behaviors than instinctual behaviors for survival. And that makes elephants and humans unique in the animal kingdom.

Sources:

Braden, Claire. "Not So Dumbo: Elephant Intelligence." BBC Website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/302feature1.shtml.

Gould, James L. Ethology: The Mechanisms and Evolution of Behavior. Norton: New York, 1982.

Granli, Petter and Joyce Poole. Elephant Voices. http://www.elephantvoices.org.

Siebert, Charles. "Are We Making Elephants Crazy?" The New York Times Magazine. Oct. 8 2006.

"Elephant Intelligence." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_intelligence