April 2020 | SMITHSONIAN 73“There are a lot of elephants that
just go in and eat as slowly and nat-
urally as they would if they were
eating in the forest,” says Joshua
Plotnik, a longtime animal cog-
nition expert who is Venkatesh’s
adviser at Hunter College. “There
are other elephants that seem to be
much more alert and aware, and so
they’ll wait on the periphery and
then they’ll go in and eat really
quickly and then walk out.”
Does that mean the elephant
knows it’s doing something wrong?
Is there a frat-boy-like thrill in
breaking the rules? “I don’t know
if they’re being mischievous,” Plot-
nik says cautiously. That’s part of
what the researchers are trying to
fi gure out: which factors motivate
elephants to raid crop fi elds, apart
from hunger alone. Plotnik and oth-
ers say they’ve seen older bulls do
especially aggressive things to get
into the fi elds, like shoving younger
elephants through electric fences.
The lab Plotnik runs at Hunt-
er is part of the university’s psy-
chology department, which might
seem whimsical, as though Plotnik
were performing Freudian psycho-
analysis on elephants. Psychology
has long included the study of an-
imals—Ivan Pavlov had his dogs,
B.F. Skinner had his pigeons, and
generations of students have run
rats and mice through mazes. The
diff erence is that Plotnik isn’t just
using elephant intelligence as
proxy for human cognition. He and
his students want to understand el-
ephants as elephants.
As easy as it is to fi nd similarities
between humans and elephants,
there are a lot of important diff er-
ences. For instance, elephants score much lower than primates
do on a test known as the A-not-B challenge. In the classic ver-
sion of this test, invented by the developmental psychologist
Jean Piaget, a researcher hides a toy under Box A and lets a
baby fi nd it. Then the researcher moves the toy to Box B while
the baby is watching and sees whether the baby knows where
to look. Elephants don’t respond well to these visual cues.But elephants have a sense of
smell that’s almost like a super-
power. When you come close to
an elephant it will point its trunk
toward you like a periscope. “He’s
exploring his environment, taking
in scent,” an elephant keeper at
the zoo told me when I asked why
a trunk was unfurling in my di-
rection. “Smellevision.” In South
Africa, elephants are sometimes
trained to sniff out bombs, though
there are obvious limitations in us-
ing elephants for police or military
work. (Try leading an elephant on a
leash through a crowded airport or
parachuting out of an airplane with
one strapped to your chest.)
Some scientists are trying to
eavesdrop on elephants by record-
ing their rumbling communica-
tions, which are at a frequency too
low for the human ear to pick up
but can travel through the ground
for miles. But Plotnik—who is pri-
marily working with wild elephants
in Thailand—and his Smithsonian
colleagues in Myanmar are more
interested in studying elephant be-
havior. It makes sense, for instance,
that elephants would rather graze in
a fi eld of delicious sugar cane than
spend all day foraging for roots and
bark. But as Venkatesh points out,
all the elephants in a given area
know the sugar cane is there but
only some of them dare to go after
it. “What we want to know is—why
are some of those individuals inter-
ested, and what makes them diff er-
ent from the other ones?”
Myanmar is a particularly good
place to look for answers because
of its large population of semi-cap-
tive elephants, which have been
living alongside humans since British colonial days, working
in the timber industry. These days, logging bans have made
their work scarce, and Myanmar isn’t quite sure what to do
with the 5,000 or so elephants living in dozens of camps all
over the country. They roam in the forests at night, and in the
morning, they come back to camp for a morning bath. While
they’re out at night, they can cause trouble: In a survey of 303What we’re looking for is individual difference
in elephants—more or less, personality.”
“
September 19 98 : Conflict Zone
A decade after
elephants in Sri Lanka graced the cover of
Smithsonian’s debut issue, the magazine
sent the British conservationist Peter F. R.
Jackson back to the island. What he found
was dispiriting. “Clashes between Man
and elephant were inevitable as displaced
elephants turned to juicy sugar cane and
rice,” Jackson wrote. “Wounded elephants
sometimes ran amok, attacking and killing
people and destroying houses, crops and
plantations.” The plight of Asian elephants
returned to our pages in 1998 (above), when
the writer Anthony Mecir traveled to Thailand,
where only 1,350 elephants still roamed free.
Nearly 4,000 captive elephants, many fueled
with amphetamines, were being forced to take
part in illegal logging operations, while tour
operators were positioning elephants all over
the country, even in busy traffi c, to impress
foreign visitors. In one of these “degrading
spectacle[s],” an elephant wrapped its trunk
around a prostitute. In another, a pregnant
woman was invited to walk under an
elephant’s belly to secure its blessings.05550
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