Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

Author:Virginia Morell [Morell, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307461469
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-26T03:00:00+00:00

WHEN MCCOMB WASN’T TESTING the elephants, she was watching them. She kept a close eye on each family’s dynamics, looking for situations that might inspire an experiment. Sometimes, she told me, she just couldn’t figure out a way to test what she wanted to know—so she thought up another way to get the answer.

One afternoon, as we followed the BB family, we were suddenly engulfed in an exuberant celebration of trumpets, screams, and rumbles as another family came trundling up to greet them. Trunks were extended to their full length and intertwined, like clasping hands; some females spun in circles, while urinating and defecating; they all lifted their heads high, rapidly flapped their ears, and roared some more. We laughed aloud at their joy.

Before this raucous greeting ceremony, the BBs had stopped feeding to listen to the approaching calls of their friends. Or so it seemed. “It always looks like they know who is coming,” McComb said. “And when you play the call of a missing family member to elephants, they run trumpeting toward the speaker. It looks like they expect to meet that individual; that they have someone ‘in mind’ they expect to see.”

We do this all the time, most often by matching auditory cues with a visual memory, such as when talking with a friend on the phone. The sound of our friend’s voice triggers a mental image of the person. It’s called “cross-modal perception”—meaning that we’re matching information we perceive with one sense (in this case, our hearing) with information we’ve previously gathered via other senses and stored in our memories.

Elephants and many other species from vervet monkeys to songbirds and parrots seem to be doing something similar to what people do. But as McComb well knows, showing with hard data that an animal actually recognizes a specific individual isn’t easy to do.

When she became stumped about how to set up such a test for elephants in the wild, she turned to domesticated horses back home instead. “It was easier to devise a test where you had some physical control of the animals,” she said.

McComb, together with her colleague David Reby and graduate student Leanne Proops, devised an experiment that could be done in a stable—which is a natural environment, she notes, for domesticated horses. A groom would hold one horse loosely by its halter rope while a second horse from the same herd was led past and guided to a position behind a barrier, where it remained hidden from the first horse. A few seconds later, the researchers, who were also behind the barrier, played a recording of a whinny. Sometimes they used the whinny of the horse that had just walked by; other times, they used the whinny of a different member of the herd. For instance, in one variation of the test, Silver watched Pepsi walk by and disappear behind the barrier. He might then hear Pepsi’s whinny, or that of Fi, a horse Silver also knew. In both situations, the scientists filmed Silver’s reactions.

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