Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task

Abstract

The capacity to recognise oneself as separate from other individuals and objects is difficult to investigate in non-human animals. The hallmark empirical assessment, the mirror self-recognition test, focuses on an animal’s ability to recognise itself in a mirror and success has thus far been demonstrated in only a small number of species with a keen interest in their own visual reflection. Adapting a recent study done with children, we designed a new body-awareness paradigm for testing an animal’s understanding of its place in its environment. In this task, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) were required to step onto a mat and pick up a stick attached to it by rope, and then pass the stick forward to an experimenter. In order to do the latter, the elephants had to see their body as an obstacle to success and first remove their weight from the mat before attempting to transfer the stick. The elephants got off the mat in the test significantly more often than in controls, where getting off the mat was unnecessary. This task helps level the playing field for non-visual species tested on cognition tasks and may help better define the continuum on which body- and self-awareness lie.

That dog won’t fit: body size awareness in dogs

“…The modular framework of self-representation also indicates that the most complex forms of this capacity should emerge in those cases of long-lived, highly social animals where the individuals engage in repeated interactions with each other (Bekoff and Sherman 2004). We have experimental evidence supporting this assumption, as positive examples were found in the case of primates (Anderson and Gallup 1999); dolphins (see for a review: Herman 2012) and also in elephants (Dale and Plotnik 2017;Plotnik et al 2006). However, we do not know about a comprehensive animal model so far, where each of the possible modules connected to self-representation would be investigated from an evolutionary and ecologically appropriate point of view.…”

Faecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites and H/L Ratio Are Related Markers of Stress in Semi-Captive Asian Timber Elephants

“…To conclude, Asian elephants are long-lived highly-social mammals with the potential capacity of self-recognition [80,81], and assessing their welfare is an ethical obligation. It has been noted that the relationship between different measures of welfare is multifaceted and not always straight-forward [82], and therefore care always needs to be taken when interpreting multiple welfare measures.…”

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“…В исследовании 2017 г. (Dale, Plotnik, 2017) азиатские слоны (Elephas maximus) должны были наступить на коврик и взять палку, прикрепленную к нему веревкой, а затем передать эту палку экспериментатору. Чтобы сделать последнее, слоны должны были воспринять (осознать) свое тело в качестве препятствия на пути к успеху и сначала убрать свой вес с мата, прежде чем пытаться перенести палку.…”