Elephants are highly self-aware

Asian elephants are even more intelligent than we realised, reports The Independent. Self-awareness is regarded as a key indicator of intelligence, and it is usually gauged using the mirror test: do the subjects realise that what they are looking at is themselves? A handful of animals, including elephants, have passed this test; but it is increasingly thought to be imperfect. So researchers devised a further test, to see whether animals are sufficiently self-aware to realise when their bodies are getting in the way of a task – and work out how to solve the problem.

For the Cambridge University study, elephants had to walk onto a mat, pick up a stick and pass it to a human; the catch was, the stick was attached to the mat. The elephants had to work out that in order to pass the stick, they had to step off the mat. “This is a deceptively simple test, but its implications are quite profound,” says Dr Josh Plotnik, a visiting researcher at the university. “The elephants understood that their bodies were getting in the way, so they stepped aside to enable themselves to complete the task. In a similar test, this is something that young children are unable to understand until they are about two years old.”