Are elephants stupid? That question has bothered me for a few years, ever since I read a paper in the online science journal PLoS ONE in 2011, which had the title ‘Insightful Problem Solving In An Asian Elephant’.
The paper detailed an experiment in which an elephant, without receiving specific training, came up with the idea of moving and piling up plastic or wooden blocks and climbing onto them in order to reach food that was otherwise inaccessible.
The elephant, the researchers concluded, was showing genuine insight in coming up with the solution.
The trouble was that earlier research had reached exactly the opposite conclusion.
A paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2006 reported the case of an elephant trained to retrieve food from a dustbin.
First, it was trained to remove the food from the bin with its trunk; then a lid was put on the bin and the elephant was trained to lift the lid and fling it away to retrieve the food.
Finally, the food was put in the bin but the lid was placed some distance away.
And what did the elephant do?
It walked straight up to the lid, picked it up, flung it away and only then went to the bin to retrieve the food.
The elephant, the researchers said, was showing no insight whatsoever but just mechanically doing what it had been taught: Go to lid; pick up lid; fling it away; go to bin; eat food.
It didn’t understand what it was doing at all.
An insightful elephant would have gone straight to the bin and eaten the food. Or would it?
The authors of the 2011 insightful elephant paper had a theory that previous researchers may have reached the wrong conclusion through ignoring the fact that using a trunk to hold a stick or to fling a dustbin lid may interfere with the use of the same trunk for sniffing out food.
However, I have two alternative explanations for the lid-flinging results:
1. The insightful elephant asks himself: “What do these guys want? First they ask me to get food out of a bin, then they put a lid on the bin. If they want me to get the food out of it, why do they put a lid on? The simple creatures seem to get pleasure from me picking up the lid and flinging it away, so I suppose that’s what they want me to do.
“And now they’ve got themselves confused and forgotten to put the lids on the bins. Well it’s their experiment, so I suppose I’d better humour them by flinging the lids away before I eat.”
2. The even more insightful elephant thinks: “The food’s in the bin and the location of the lid is irrelevant. They obviously want to show something about elephantine behaviour though, and if I go straight to the bin and eat the food, the whole experiment will have been a waste of time because that’s the natural thing to do.
“If I do it, the experiments will cease and they’ll stop offering me dustbins full of food. If I walk up to a lid and fling it, the experiments will surely continue. It’s a no-brainer. I may be thick-skinned but I’m not stupid. So let’s get on with the lid-flinging.”
Further research is clearly needed.