The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
While it is true that not all of the acts in the latter part of
this performance were performed by each one of the elephants who
went through the military drill, there is no reason to doubt the
entire ability of each individual to be trained to obey the whole
thirty-three commands, and to remember them all accurately and
without confusion. The most astonishing feature of the
performance, aside from the perfect obedience of the huge beasts,
was their easy confidence and accuracy of memory.
We come now to a consideration of the Accomplishments of Working
Elephants. In all the timber-forests of southern India every
captive elephant is taught to perform all the following acts and
services, as I have witnessed on many occasions:
1. To _salaam,_ or salute, by raising the trunk.
2. To kneel, to receive a load or a passenger.
3. When standing, to hold up a fore-foot, to serve the driver as a
step in climbing to his place.
4. To lie down to be washed, first on one side and then on the
other.
5. To open the mouth. 6. To "hand up" any article from the
ground to the reach of a person riding.
7. To pull down an obstructing bough.
8. To halt.
9. To back.
10. To pick up the end of a drag-rope and place it between the
teeth.
11. To drag a timber.
12. To kneel and with the head turn a log over, or turn it with
the tusks if any are present.
13. To push a log into position parallel with others.
14. To balance and carry timbers on the tusks, if possessing tusks
of sufficient size.
15. To "speak," or trumpet.
16. To work in harness.
Every working elephant in India is supposed to possess the
intelligence necessary to the performance of all the acts
enumerated above at the command of his driver, either by spoken
words, a pressure of the knees or feet, or a touch with the
driving goad. For the sake of generalization I have purposely
excluded from this list all tricks and accomplishments which are
not universally taught to working elephants. We have seen,
however, that performing elephants are capable of executing
nearly double the number of acts commonly taught to the workers;
and, while it is useless to speculate upon the subject, it must be
admitted that, were a trainer to test an elephant's memory by
ascertaining the exact number of commands it could remember and
execute in rotation, the result would far exceed anything yet
obtained. For my own part, I believe it would exceed a hundred.
The performance in the circus-ring is limited by time and space,
and not by the mental capacity of the elephants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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