74 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020
MAP:^GUILBERT^ GATESMyanmar farmers published last year, 38 percent indicated
that they’d lost half or more of their crop fi elds to elephants
in the preceding year.
To care for its elephants , Myanmar employs thousands of
elephant keepers known as oozis—or, as they’re called in oth-
er Asian countries, mahouts. (Outside of Myanmar, most ma-
houts work at elephant sanctuaries, temples and other places
where tourists come to see elephants.) It’s a profession that’s
passed on from father to son. Starting in his teens, a boy will
get to know a particular elephant—working with it every day,
learning its body language and developing the skills to nego-
tiate with it. (Negotiation is necessary. It’s hard to force an el-
ephant to do something it really doesn’t want to do.) The ele-
phants in the camps spend most of their days either restrained
by chains near the mahouts’ homes, or with the mahouts them-
selves riding on their backs.
Scientists in Myanmar rely heavily on local keepers to com-
municate with the elephants,
almost like interpreters. “You
can see the relationship,” says
Peter Leimgruber, the head of
the Smithsonian Conservation
Biology Institute’s Conserva-
tion Ecology Center. “You see
some mahouts who don’t need
to do much. You can see the
person and the elephant work-
ing together in a beautiful way.”
As soon as Venkatesh be-
gan giving elephants per-
sonality tests, he was struck
by the range of reactions. In
one early instance, he put a
bucket of food in front of an
elephant to see if it would lift
the lid. Instead, the elephant
got impatient and stomped on
the bucket, breaking it open.
Venkatesh found this endear-
ing. “Because elephants are so
highly intelligent, we can see a
lot of emotion and thought in
what they do,” he says.
Since January 2019, Ven-
katesh and his colleagues have
been giving the PVC-pipe test
to elephants in Myanmar to ob-
serve problem-solving styles. The researchers are outfi tting the
same elephants with GPS collars, to track their movements.
Is there a correlation between how an elephant performs on
the PVC-pipe test and how it acts when it’s roaming around
on its own? Do elephants that approached the pipe tentatively
also stay farther from the fi elds? Do the ones who ripped at
the pipe aggressively or solve the test quickly also brave the
fi recrackers and spotlights the farmers set off to scare them
away at night?
If elephants who are risk-takers can be identifi ed, maybe
the scientists will be able to fi gure out how to better keep
them out of the plantations and thus reduce confl ict with
people. If the elephants willing to take the biggest risks also
have more of a sweet tooth, maybe it will help to throw off
their sense of smell by planting citrus trees near a sugarcane
farm. Learning all the diff erent methods elephants employ
to take down an electric fence would probably be helpful for
designing better fences.
“It’s all very idealistic at this point, I have to admit,” says
Plotnik. “But it’s a novel approach. How can we fi gure out
which traits are more likely to lead elephants to crop-raid?
Can we condition their behavior? Infl uence their needs?
When a child, for example, is told he can’t have the cookies
in a cookie jar, he still wants a cookie. But we don’t put up an
electric fence in the kitchen to deter our children. We come up
with non-harmful, encouraging ways to keep them away from
the cookies. I think we can do the same for elephants.”CHINAMYANMARAREA OF
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