Transcript

MAN:

[INAUDIBLE] It’s February 12, and it just, in the last portion of his pre-training, he’s learning how to beg. He had a hard time to still swing his trunk first before he does it, but now we are waiting, and it’s at least one second before we let him go. That’s the usual set-up, and the pre-training is usually done by either Donna [Nissani] or myself.

Again, he’s swinging it. That’s the way he always did it, but at least, now he’s able to settle.

DONNA NISSANI:

Next, an example of our session number nine.

This is session nine. This is Ade-Oui-Maang. It’s February 21, and we’re ready to go. This is Scarecrow Person. All righty.

OK. Now we have fans. They’re black fans. They’re not the old-fashioned ones that we had before, and he is going to the one that can’t see him.

OK. Third round here, we’re ready to go.

Much better this time. Here we go with the bamboo wall, and they’re ready to go. Go!

And that was an easy one to choose from.

Here we go. We’re going to do black fans again. And the wrong one again.

Ready. Here we go. Go!

Oh, that was much better. That was much better.

OK. Now this one is the guys each have on one of my two rings. One is an elephant ring. It’s got the elephant hair from Momo A, from Cheshire. The other one is my amethyst ring. And they’ve just switched rings.

And whoever has on the elephant, Momo A ring, the elephant tail ring, is the one that is the correct one. And we’re doing this as a way to tell that everything is kosher. Because there’s no way, no matter how smart the elephant is, it’s going to figure this out.

Here’s the rings, just so we can have an idea of what we’re talking about. The elephant ring obviously is the one on the top.

OK. Here comes the old scarecrow again. Not looking his best. He got attacked the other night, brutally, by one of the elephants trying to get the food out of his pocket. This one is, depending on which ear your hand is covering, is the one that the elephant is supposed to choose.

Now we’re going to do another one of the ear ones. These are controls to make sure that we’re not giving any unconscious signals to the elephants to help them decide which one to choose from. That’s not the end of session nine. There’s still some more to go, but they’re all repeats of what I’ve already shown, so we’re going to conclude the tape. All righty.

We may note in passing that the performance of our elephants in this task, 69 per cent correct, was roughly equal to that of our chimpanzees, 67 per cent. This means that both species, in about 30 per cent of the trials, begged from a person who could not see them. Here is just one brief example from Beauty, our star performer at the Detroit Zoo. Note that she is facing a person who can see her begging gesture, and goes out of her way to beg from a person who can’t see her at all.

This is Beauty again. This is the last one, and it’s buckets, and we’re ready to go whenever you are.

[Are elephants conscious?]

We went to the Detroit Zoo and the jungles of Burma, because we love elephants, and we’re curious about them. We were fortunate enough to gather some new information about their vision, olfaction, short-term memory, learning abilities, and behaviour. But we failed to come up with an unequivocal answer to the question, which was uppermost in our minds, and which constitutes, in our view, the fundamental question of both animal behaviour and comparative psychology. That is, are animals conscious? Is our Lila conscious?

Are elephants, for instance, to paraphrase Colin Allen, big zombies walking about without any awareness? Or are they, as Joyce Poole believes after decades of closely observing them in the wild, nearly as aware as human beings are? Can they think or solve problems in their head? Do they understand anything? Are they aware of their own selves and of the selves of others? Are they capable of empathy, compassion, or deliberate cruelty?

Once resolved, the answer to these questions will forever alter our view of elephants and, perhaps, also our conception of all other animals, ourselves included. When Moti and I started our adventures with elephants, we took their consciousness for granted, and hoped to come up with an unequivocal experimental evidence in its favour.

Instead, although the meagre evidence we have gathered so far is only suggestive and circumstantial, and although it does not rule out consciousness, to Moti this evidence appears more consistent with the odd view that elephants do not think. I, on the other hand, feel that there is enough of an anecdotal and field evidence to support the view that elephants are conscious.

In a few years, we hope we shall have a more definite answer. For now, we just want to end this film by saying that we are profoundly touched by our brief sojourn with elephants, and that we shall be forever grateful to the people and the institutions who made this sojourn possible.

Thank you, too, for joining us.