In the Forest with Myanmar’s Logging Elephants (January 15, 2004)

 

 

Our bamboo hut, an elephant handler, a “scientist,” and  2 passersby

 

 From November 2002 to March 2003, my wife Donna and I resided in 3 logging camps in the country of Myanmar (or Burma), living with, loving, and studying elephants.  Our stated goal was to carry out research with elephants in a semi-natural setting.  But equally important to us was the chance to live in an exotic country like Myanmar and to get to know its people, culture, politics, and environment.  In short, we wanted to follow our dreams and merge science and adventure, work and joy. 

 

 

Elephants love water 

 We were in close contact, for about 100 days, 6 hours a day, with some 30 elephants.  Our daily routine included such things as chasing away a 2-year-old rambunctious little tyke (that is, a baby weighing “only” 600 lbs or so), giving wide berth to a cantankerous 50-year-old arthritic grandmother, playing hide and go seek with a blind teenager, and hugging a gigantic tusker.  We saw elephants at work and play, at our experimental area and at our hut.  At night, when they were set free to roam in the jungle, we could hear their wooden bells everywhere.  We watched them bathing and pushing logs, trumpeting and sneaking in eerie silence into forbidden areas.    

We also learned a great deal about elephants.  Among the highlights:

·        Myanmar is often portrayed as the jewel of elephant conservation in Asia.  Sadly though, in a planet where money is king, this primacy among nations means little.  Unless Myanmar quickly stabilizes its population and eliminates poachers and machines from its remaining forests, its elephants face an uncertain future. 

·        Normal elephants do not see very well.  In fact, by human standards they are far below the legal blindness threshold.  In an open field, you could  probably detect the presence a 5-ft person from some 3 miles away, but, if you stood perfectly still 110 feet downwind from an elephant, that elephant will not see you (remember this the next time an elephant comes charging at you!).

·        Do not however underestimate an elephant’s sense of smell.  With the wind in her favor, an elephant can probably sniff your presence from over a mile away, and a blind elephant can often zero in on you from 100 ft away, by using her “olfactory periscope” (trunk).

·        Some elephants may have a fantastic short-term memory—possibly better than the short-term memory of 5-year-old children.

·        Young elephants are adept at some discrimination tasks (e.g., learning to choose a white object and not a black one) than previously believed.  On the other hand, older elephants seem unable to master such simple tasks.

·        Elephants do not recognize themselves in a mirror.

·        Elephants are excellent at solving problems, but they seem to do so by randomly trying everything and hitting on the solution by chance, not through thinking or insight. 

·        Elephants do not seem to fully appreciate the fact that it makes more sense to beg from a person who can see them than from a person who cannot see them.

·        In 2 hours of training, elephants can learn to remove a lid from a bucket, insert their trunk into the bucket, and remove a treat from the bottom of the bucket, but they seem to do so mechanically, without understanding what they are doing, without understanding, for instance, that the lid must be removed because it blocks access to the treat at the bottom of the bucket. 

·        Taken together, these and many other results seem to point to the odd conclusion that elephants are not conscious, and that, in point of fact, they do not think at all.  Although they can learn and remember a great deal, these cognitive processes seem devoid of real understanding.

 

I started this research project with the conviction that these giants are conscious, scoffing at the few comparative psychologists who insisted otherwise.  The realization that elephants may lack consciousness was for me just one more painful example of the essential nature of science—the slaying of a long-held pet hypothesis by a few ugly facts.  I’d love changing my mind on the subject, would love siding with Charles Darwin (an animal consciousness advocate) or my wife Donna (who saw what I saw, yet firmly rejects my pessimistic conclusion).  At the moment though, the conscienceless view appears to me more consistent with our observations.     

Anyway, if you want to find out more about elephants, read a published review of our earlier work at the zoo, see a slide show, or read the script of our 2-hour-long elephant film (which summarizes our recent, not yet published, work), please visit:  www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/

 Back to Moti Nissani's Homepage