Elephants Get The Point: Understand Human Pointing Without Being Trained, Unlike Any Other Animal

Elephants get the point, apparently.

A new study by researchers at Scotland's University of St. Andrews found elephants understand pointing by humans without being trained.

The study may indicate that elephants have a much deeper social perception than was previously thought.

Elephants, it seems, are special-understanding as much or more as other "social" animals like dogs.

A lead author in the study,  Prof Richard Byrne, said,"With  the possible exception of domestic dogs, no other animal spontaneously interprets pointing correctly."

 "They have to learn it over many trials, and some, like the chimpanzee, are pretty poor even at doing that."

The study was conducted by a PhD student of Prof Byrne's, Anna Smet. Smet conducted research in Zimbabwe at an animal rescue group.

Each morning, Smet would set up the buckets for the test. The elephants could see her putting food in the bucket, but didn't know which it was.

Each elephant was shown with buckets, one of which contained food. While the animal was watching, Smet would point to the bucket that contained the food and take note of which one the elephant attempted first. She found that the elephants picked the right bucket about 67.5% of the time.

Elephants did this naturally, with no previous training-and they showed no improvement during the study.  "The elephants did not seem to need to learn how to understanding pointing, they were just as good on trial 1 as any other!" explains Byrne.

This is unusual because other species may be taught to undersand pointing-after initial attempts to find the food.

One-year old human babies perform just slightly better at 72% in similar tests.

In an interview, Bryne said that no species other than humans points naturally-so for elephants, "the skill has to come from somewhere."

"We're now thinking that this must come from the natural communication system of elephants, although pointing has never been described in the wild. But they do a lot with their trunks that could, in principal, function as pointing," he says.

Bryne and Smet also tested the elephant perceptions by pointing with her arm corssing her body or standing closer to the wrong bucket. These didn't seem to affect the elephant performance.

The only test that elephants couldn't understand was when the researcher looked at the bucket of food rather than pointing to it. This may be due to the poor eyesight elephants have.

Diana Reiss, an expert on elephant cognition at Hunter College, questioned the study, wondering whether elephants had learned to interpret pointing by their handlers.

"In these elephant camps such opportunities can easily go unnoticed by their human caretakers," Reiss said.

Byrne and Smet said they plan to address this issue and will investigate whether wild elephants can point to each other.

What do you think? Are you surprised elephants can point? Sound off below!