Elephants get the point

When scientists test other species,they find that pointing is a rare gift in the animal kingdom. Even our closest relatives,likes chimpanzees,dont seem to get the point of pointing.

But Byrne and his graduate student Anna Smet now say they have discovered wild animals that also appear to understand pointing: elephants. The study,involving just 11 elephants,is hardly the last word on the subject. But it raises a provocative possibility that elephants have a deep social intelligence that rivals humans in some ways.

Researchers use a simple but powerful test to see if animals understand pointing. They put food in one of two identical containers and then silently point at the one with food in it. Then they wait to see which container the animal approaches.

While primates and most other animals that have been studied fail the test,a few have done well. Most of them are domesticated mammals,with dogs proving to be especially good at understanding pointing.

These results have prompted some researchers to speculate that during domestication,animals evolve to become keenly aware of humans. In the mid-2000s,Byrne began to wonder if elephants could pass the pointing test too. He got the idea while he and a graduate student were conducting an experiment on wild elephants in Kenya. They found that elephants could distinguish the smells of people from hidden pieces of clothing. Sometimes,Byrne noticed,the elephants would curl up their trunks,aiming them at the source of the smell.

Maybe they were pointing, Byrne said. But they could be just sniffing the breeze.

The logical way to start exploring this possibility would be to give elephants the pointing test. But these giant mammals are a lot more challenging to work with than a poodle. In fact,it wasnt until last year that one of Byrnes students,Smet,was able to run the test.

Smet travelled to Zimbabwe,where a company called Wild Horizons offers elephant-back safaris. Each morning,while the elephants were waiting to take tourists on a trip,Smet would set up two buckets behind a screen.

An elephant handler would bring one of the animals a few yards away from her. The elephant watched Smet lower pieces of fruit behind the screen and put them into one of the buckets. But the elephant couldnt see which bucket she put the fruit in.

I actually checked that from elephant height, Smet said.

Smet then brought the buckets out from behind the screen and stood between them. She pointed at the one with the fruit inside,and the handler walked the elephant toward the buckets. Smet noted which bucket it stuck its trunk in first.

For two months,Smet tested 11 elephants. When she crunched the data afterward,she found that the elephants picked the right bucket 67.5 per cent of the time. Human babies at 1 years old do a little better at these tests,scoring 72.7 per cent.

Smet and Byrne have published their results in the journal Current Biology.

Byrne is also curious to know whether any other highly social wild mammals can also pass the pointing test. Whales and dolphins would be at the top of his list,but he isnt holding his breath for those experiments to be published.

They make elephants look easy to work with, he said.

CARL ZIMMER