The Giant Genius – Inside the Mind of an Elephant | Free Documentary Nature

I started tracking elephants using GPS back in 1995. But now we're seeing new behaviour, a new set of decision-making. This is quite a dangerous area for the elephants. There have been a lot of poachers here, dying in ambush. Elephants cross the danger zone in the evening and then they try to get to a new safe haven by dawn. They've got to be conscious of what they're doing. That is something amazing, that they had something in their mind. As humans, we observe animals a great deal. But sometimes we forget that animals are also observing us. What's going on inside their heads? What would it be like just for a day to look at the world through their eyes? In the heart of Kenya, Frank Pope tracks the daily movements of elephants across a dangerous landscape. We're now in Samburu National Reserve. So there's this sort of patchwork, mosaic of protection for the elephants. And the elephants can pick up quite sensitively where the protection is relative to the wild outdoors. GPS collars allow the team from Save the Elephants to monitor the giants' movements from the ground. They want to understand where the elephants move and why. They've obviously got a spatial knowledge of where they're safe across a vast landscape. Ian Douglas-Hamilton has seen the areas between the protected parks become ever more treacherous in the decades he's worked here. The dangers that the elephants face in this area are mainly from people killing for ivory. Before, we may have had two safe havens linked by a safe area to go between. Now, maybe that area's been invaded. Now, these dense settlements, it's a bit of a killing ground between crossings. But the elephants' movements show they're learning the zigzag boundaries of the local parks. You don't need to know where the borders of that reserve are on a map. There's no fence. There's nothing on the ground for you to see that this is protected and this is not. But you can see it through the elephants' movements. The elephants know where is safe and where is not within tens of metres. But there are times when they still want to cross the danger zones. And they've found a new way to do it. Over 300 kilometres away, in another wildlife sanctuary, elephant behaviourist Joyce Poole has noticed family groups preparing to run a similar dog. Sometimes, they look like they're doing nothing. They're just sort of standing there. But there's a certain posture when they're waiting. To the untrained eye, the family seems to be resting near the edge of the park. But 40 years of studying elephant communication allow Poole to see what others miss. I don't think there are very many people who read elephants the way I do. You look over to the matriarch. She's doing this J-sniffing. She's opening and closing the bottom of her trunk, ears attentive. The leader's keen senses search beyond the park boundary. Different elephants, hundreds of kilometres apart, but the same mysterious behaviour has daylight fades. You're following your dot. You've got your elephant. It's mid-afternoon, coming back up from the river. Suddenly, you see him moving to the edge of the protected area. They're all standing in a bunch. A little bit agitated, some let's-go calling. The dot pulses for five o'clock, dot pulses for six o'clock, still in the protected area. The matriarch makes a move, and everyone's ready. Seven o'clock, he's already out, and suddenly the dots are spaced out further apart because he's moving fast across that exposed landscape. The elephants move with purpose, straight toward their destination. They use the cover of darkness to walk for miles, past settlements, poachers and danger. At morning, the elephants are all back in protected parks. As soon as they're across this invisible line where they feel safe, they'll stop. Elephants have the ability to make plans, to communicate those plans, to negotiate, if necessary, and then to execute those plans and go to a pre-arranged destination. I don't know how they do it, but the way it looks like is that they've got a map in their head. Elephants have walked the earth for millennia, but these secretive dashes appear to be new. The giants are changing their ancient ways, and they appear to be doing it because of us. Just 100 years ago, 10 million elephants roamed across Africa. These places were teeming with wildlife, but then came the poaching, and many, many thousands of elephants were killed. Today, elephants have few places to feel safe. Humans relentlessly encroach on their habitat, and kill them in astonishing numbers to feed the ivory trade. One elephant is murdered every 15 minutes. Park warden Richard Obanda has witnessed it firsthand. It's painful. It's painful, really. In my time, I've seen a lot of elephants dead. And you ask yourself why? Put a seven-tonner down just because somebody needs a bracelet? It's out of this world. I've seen men die to protect animals, and that's our life. Today, biologist Mike Chase is spearheading a massive effort to count how many elephants have survived the carnage. We know how fast we're losing elephants. How many elephants currently exist is guesswork. He's partnered with other scientists to fly thousands of hours across the continent to find out where the elephants live and the extent of human impact. Wherever he goes, Chase discovers that elephants are finding new strategies to survive. How are you doing, Mike? Yeah, very good. Conservationist Richard Moeller has spent years monitoring a handful of giants whose enormous tusks make them prime targets for poachers. He's a really special guy. Yeah, he calls himself a bull. This massive bull is rumoured to be the largest in Africa. It's certainly the biggest boy I've seen. I was just wondering why he'd be a little skittish and shy. Often when you approach, he will turn away and literally put his tusks in a bush. So he knows damn fine that he is carrying something that, unfortunately, humans want to hack out of him. He would dart to a shrub or a bush and had what appeared to be the ability to know that he had a very prized possession that people would kill him for. I'm sure he'll come back. Moeller's convinced the elephant is deliberately trying to hide his tusks from poachers. How could Satao know that men want to take his tusks? Ivory that could be worth a quarter million dollars or more. It looks like he's coming back. It was only once we got back to the lodge and started downloading the photos and being able to zoom in that we noticed two horrible wounds on his left side. One was oozing pus and the other dripping blood. He's clearly been targeted. Satao could surely remember being attacked by men, but realizing they were after his tusks would take a whole other level of thought. Neuroscientist Christoph Koch studies the mind and how it works. Maybe, yes, he has seen other animals being killed because of their tusks. And so maybe from that he can infer that this is what the poachers are after, although that really would require a great deal of very abstract thought. It's an ability some say only humans possess. We've always drawn a line in the sand between humans and non-human animals. And there's enough research now to show that we may not be quite as unique as we think we are. If you were to look at an animal like Satao, pretty clever if you think about it, to hide the tusks so that the humans couldn't see them. Bob Jacobs studies the brains of elephants and humans. The fact that he would hide his tusks in the presence of some humans would suggest something called theory of mind, because that would suggest that he has some idea of what's in another animal's brain, and he's interpreting that, and that's altering his behavior. Very few creatures have shown they have this ability. I don't want to claim that elephants have human-like reasoning ability to do, you know, really complicated, very abstract tasks. At least I'd like to see more evidence for that. Some scientists use a mirror as their window into an animal's mind. We take for granted the ability to recognize yourself, to see yourself as separate from others. That is actually a complex cognitive ability. Only a handful of species have shown they can comprehend their own reflection. The great apes, magpies, dolphins and humans. But psychologist Josh Plotnick's work shows there is another. For nearly a decade, I've been working with captive Asian elephants in Thailand. In the controlled setting of captivity, both Asian and African elephants display self-awareness. But such work has never been done in the wild. Plotnick travels to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, one of Africa's most untamed places. He's come to Abu Camp, a safari camp that doubles as a rescue center for orphaned and abandoned elephants. Like all elephant families, the Abu herd is led by a matriarch named Kathy. First exposure. Their initial exposure to the mirror is one of, what is that? Who's that other elephant in the mirror? Kathy reacts as if a strange elephant has approached her family. She invites the stranger to play. But the reflection copies her every move. An intelligent animal is going to be thinking, why aren't I getting the feedback that I normally get from another animal? The zoo elephants Plotnick has studied have almost no exposure to unfamiliar elephants. But Kathy and her herd meet new elephants almost daily. Kathy did what most animals do when they first experience that stranger in the mirror. She reached her trunk out towards it. She looked behind it, over, under it, as if she's asking herself, I see this strange animal, where is it? A lot of species get to that point, but they never start to process that, wait a minute, maybe that's not another individual, maybe it's me. Over the next several days, other elephants take turns exploring the mirror. Touching it, smelling the frame, listening with alert ears. Another female named Shireenie happens to approach the mirror at the same time as her three-year-old daughter. And that might help them to start thinking, why is that elephant standing next to a stranger when I'm standing next to that elephant? Bit by bit, Shireenie's behavior changes. I think Shireenie is by far the most advanced in terms of the mirror test at this point. She relaxed and then actually stroked the end of her tusk before grasping it, as if she's asking, why is that tusk in the mirror similar to the tusk on me? Once Plotnick thinks an elephant might recognize herself in a mirror, he looks for a more objective measure. He marks one side of her face with visible paint and the other with invisible paint. This way, the only difference is what she can see. If you're an elephant that recognizes yourself, you might be concerned with this strange white X on your face. Shireenie leans in and seems to pay attention to the mark. She doesn't touch it, but she searches for information as much with her trunk as with her eyes. For animals that are highly visual, such as us, the mirror test is a great way to assess visual self-representation. But creatures, for instance, like a dog, have a very intense olfactory representation, but not a visual self-representation, because the sense of vision isn't nearly as important to them as the sense of smell. Self-awareness is really an ability to reflect within one's mind on oneself. The ability to see yourself. And it's not a visual seeing, it's a mental seeing. An elephant's self-image may not be an image at all. Vision is actually the least important sense to the elephant. Elephants don't see in full color like we do. They have a wide field of view, but poor resolution. Their sense of smell is far superior to their sense of vision. They have an extraordinary sense of smell. I've watched them go for miles on the scent of another elephant. They're picking up scents, I think, from maybe a day and a half before. They can even smell a waterhole several miles away. Many animals rely on smell more than we do, but it may be the elephant's dominant sense. Their olfactory world is probably a great deal more complex than our olfactory world. The parts of our brain that process smell are about the size of cotton swabs. Those of a dog are bigger, the size of your thumb. And an elephant's olfactory bulbs are as big as the palm of your hand. For the olfactory bulbs to be that large, it has to support particular abilities. Something's going on there. Something that makes their everyday experience radically different than ours. And smell is just the beginning. They can hear sounds way below our level of hearing. Elephants monitor such infrasound at great distances. They can pick up other calling elephants from up to 10 kilometres away. And then they'll stop and then listen, to see them listen. But these senses don't explain all their abilities. When they're walking along in a procession, and the matriarch is at the back, if she stops, everyone stops. How do they know she stopped? It's pretty striking. They're in constant touch with what's going on around them. People have said, oh, do elephants have a sixth sense? Caitlin O'Connell is studying the physics behind elephant behaviour and communication. In this research camp in Namibia, she's uncovering a unique way they perceive the world, and perhaps keep tabs on us. As an elephant rumbles, it's produced at a sound pressure level of about 120 decibels. That is like a mini explosion. This deep vocalisation is on a wavelength we can barely hear, but it shakes the earth itself. Elephants are picking up something at long distances away, through the ground, a vibration in the ground. O'Connell believes they sense these vibrations with their feet and trunk. This device is made for the home theatre industry. It plays back the low frequency from movies, and it works great for sending back elephant signals through the ground. The team will isolate the shaker several metres underground, so it plays only in the earth and not above it. They'll play a subsonic warning call, and monitor an approaching herd to see if they sense it with their feet. The otherwise silent distress call goes out, warning that a lion is nearby. Immediately, the elephants freeze, and bunch together in defence. They align their bodies with the direction of the underground vibrations, gauge how far the threat may be, and decide to leave the area. The same sensory ability may allow them to detect far-off thunderstorms. They can pick up distant thunderstorms, perhaps 150 kilometres away. All of a sudden, they'll freeze and lean forward on their front feet. Lift a foot off the ground, orienting in a direction. That's the behaviour that we see when a signal in the ground or a vehicle is coming, anything that causes a vibration from a long distance away. This sensitivity to vibrations gives them an environmental awareness we can hardly imagine. What's the brain doing to elaborate on that information and to interpret that information? That's where it's interesting. What's going on inside their heads? The elephant brain, fundamentally, appears to be different from what we see in other mammals. I've been working on human tissue for decades, and so when we received the elephant tissue, it was the first time I'd looked outside the primate brain. That's always a moment of discovery and excitement to see what's there. When it comes to hardware, the elephant brain is around three times bigger than a human's. It's also very convoluted. It's fitting a lot of neural machinery in a small space. It wouldn't be that large or that complex unless it were serving some important purpose. Nature is not going to give you a large brain unless it's absolutely necessary. If you cut the brain in half and look at it, what strikes you first is that the cerebellum is huge. It's about one-third the size of the cerebrum, and the human, it would be about a quarter of the size. The cerebellum takes in all that sensory information the elephant gets from smelling, hearing, feeling and seeing the world. It also coordinates bodily functions, like voluntary muscle movements. For humans, that means things like using tools. We thought, well, humans have a large cerebellum because we have hands and digits and mouths. We need very fine motor control over those. Humans have incredible control over the 34 muscles that operate each hand. Elephants don't have hands, but they have 15,000 muscles in their trunks. And they have very fine motor control over that. The trunk is a hand, and it also has fingers. I've seen elephants pick up tiny crumbs that I put outside my tent for the birds. It's used for drinking, but it's even more than that. Use it to cool themselves down. Push over trees. Oh, man, a whole palm tree over me. Use it to caress another elephant. Sniff, sniff. I wish I had a trunk. The trunk is every bit as complex, if not more complex, than the human hand. That would explain why they have a large cerebellum, but I think it's more complex than that. It's coordinating the elephant's entire body's interaction with the outside world. The oversized cerebellum manages an elephant's perception and movement. But what about thinking? That happens in the cerebral cortex, the thin outer layer of the neighboring cerebrum. The cortex gives rise to what we think of intelligence. Reasoning, planning, memory, perception. As far as I know, I was the first person to be able to see what the cells in the African elephant's brain in the elephant cortex looked like. My daughter, who was three at the time, was the second person. My first impression was, this is magnificent. Every bit as magnificent as elephants are in the wild. The elephant cortex has about twice the mass of a human's. It's less tightly packed than our brains, with only one third of the number of crucial brain cells called neurons. But an elephant's neurons are different from ours. There was something unique about the cells, and it took us a while to figure out what was going on. The analogy for a neuron would be like a tree. The tree has branches on it, and neurons have what are called dendrites, which are basically branches of these cells that stretch out and receive input from other cells. Neurons in the brains of humans and other primates have short dendrites that branch a lot. In the elephant, we get dendrites that don't branch a lot, but they're extremely long. Dendrites have little spines on them that take in information. The more spines a neuron has, the more connections it can make, and the more information it can process. In an elephant, a single cell can have up to 100,000 connections on it, which means that that cell is processing huge amounts of information. Overall, elephant brains are as interconnected as ours are. Not all intelligent brains have to follow the template set by humans. There's more than one way to wire a brain to get an intelligent brain. The differences in how we're wired may affect the way we think. The human brain seems to be designed for quick decisions and quick action. Because of the longer distance between cells and the longer dendrites, we wonder if perhaps the elephant brain is designed to think about things a little more deeply and to be more contemplative. Very often, elephants look like they're doing nothing. But if you look closely, you can see they're actually thinking, they're contemplating. And you can see it in their ears, you can see it in their eyes, you can see it in their trunks. And you can really watch, almost as if you're watching this brain at work. So what do elephants ponder out in the wild with those big brains? Today, they're likely to be thinking more and more about us, the danger we pose. And how to protect their families. Family is everything to an elephant. From the moment they're born, elephants are constantly surrounded by relatives. When they're born, their brains are only about a third their adult size. Human brains are about a quarter. Just like humans, elephants have a lot of learning to do. And just like us, they grow up in a world filled with voices. They have a special call they make to babies, to comfort a baby. Coo rumble, I call it. As elephants grow, so does their vocabulary. Elephants are constantly communicating with one another. Sometimes acoustically, with using calls. And sometimes using body language. Poole has identified over 200 postures and gestures elephants use to communicate. And around 50 localizations. Some serve as warnings. And when that sound is given, you see everyone freezing and listening. So it's a kind of, hey guys, heads up, pay attention. There's a specific warning call for bees. And another one... for us. There's even evidence they can distinguish us and the threats we pose simply by the language we're speaking. Researchers in Kenya recently played recordings of human voices to a group of elephants. When confronted with the language of the Kamba people, who have no history of violence toward elephants... ...the elephants don't respond. But when they hear the language of the Maasai, who sometimes attack them with spears... ...the elephants bunch together and run away. And they've got us all catalyzed, they've got us all figured out. So a big male like Setao, monitoring all the time. He'd been targeted before, so he would have had a concept of what is a poacher and a human that was not a poacher. All this knowledge, all this incredible sensory abilities, all of that contemplation in that big brain, was that enough to save Setao? No, it wasn't. Poachers have killed one of Kenya's most famous elephants. Setao was shot dead by poisoned arrows. The poachers who took his life were never found. To lose an elder like Setao is to lose a lifetime of knowledge and experience. There are ripple effects through the society. It's not just one elephant's death, but it's several elephants' death, most likely, because each individual is a sort of a building block. For many animals, death is a daily part of life in the wild, something few seem to reflect on. But elephants respond to each loss deeply. Elephants definitely have a concept of death. They have an understanding of killing also. And they mourn. Elephants mourn. Elephants often spend hours or even days with the bodies of poached family members, inspecting the faces where tusks once were. Poaching happens across Africa, with the deadliest hot spots in Mozambique and Tanzania and the Congo Basin. More than 100,000 elephants have been killed in just these three areas in the last five years. One question matters most for those that remain. Are they clever enough, adaptable enough to survive? Elephants have to be very adaptive. They have to adapt to a changing environment, which requires a great deal of mental flexibility. If you're presented with a problem, can you solve it one way, but also figure out a second way to solve that problem? In one experiment, Plotnik presented a group of Asian elephants with a problem to test their ability to cooperate. He placed two buckets of corn on a table with a rope threaded through the side. If you pick up one end of the rope and pull it without the other being held, the rope becomes unthreaded from the table. The elephants learned to pick up either end of the rope and pull together to get the corn. It confirmed their capacity for cooperation. But that's not all. Very quickly, one elephant approached the rope and in some sort of eureka moment, she simply put her foot on the rope and made her partner do all the work. She found a new and better solution. I didn't even come up with this potential solution. In this case, I think the elephants outsmarted me. They're smart enough to adapt to the changing world around them. Elephants are not just victims. They've been monitoring us, their main predator, for thousands and thousands of years. We are changing their landscape. We are blocking their migration routes. They're changing the things they do in order to survive. Herds that encounter man-made obstacles learn to navigate them. Whether they're roads... or towns... to fences. Individuals develop unique solutions. As they pass their discoveries on to others, these become culture. And herds react differently when we get too close. In some cases, elephants respond to people by... coming together and attacking. In other places, they respond to people by panic running. But across the continent, more and more, elephants are finding there's nowhere left to run. In the course of conducting the Great Elephant Census, Mike Chase and his colleagues have flown the distance to the moon. And halfway back, they've counted Africa's remaining savanna elephants. And what they've seen is sobering. When I started this survey, I looked at a map of Africa, which was dotted with green areas of protected national parks. And nothing can be further from the truth. Rivers have been dammed. Roads have been built through pristine wilderness areas. There are very few of these refugia left. Oh, my goodness. If you think about the speed at which we are impacting their societies, the best chance that elephants have of surviving is by adapting their culture. They're sharing information and seeking out safer ground. Throughout the census, we have seen elephants in places where I never expected to see them. At the bottom of craters, in desert habitats, forest habitats, on the top of mountains. And the reason that they are eking out a living in these remote habitats is primarily because they've been pushed to the limits. They've been in retreat across the continent. Some take refuge in deserts. Even here, they can adapt to survive. Elephants are extending their ranges into new places to find suitable habitat and food and water. This advancement has been led by big bulls. Not all of them make it. It is the edge of beyond. It's a remote, hostile, arid environment. They can go four days without drinking if they have to. Their extraordinary senses help them find water in the deepest desert. And safety in the bleak frontier. Many walked hundreds of miles to get here. A lot of elephants are essentially political refugees. They've been disturbed and persecuted and have sought sanctuary and safety. They know which countries they're safe in. They know which countries they're not. Today, the largely desert nation of Botswana is home to more elephants than anywhere else on Earth. Botswana, in the early 1900s, had a very small population of a few thousand elephants. Recent estimates suggest that we may have between 130,000 and 210,000 elephants. This is their last stronghold. But it doesn't have to be. While elephants are losing ground across most of Africa, countries like Uganda, Namibia and Gabon have stable or recovering populations. These can become safe homes for elephants again, with the help of human minds. We've accumulated the largest data set that's ever been amassed on the African continent. And I hope the results will definitely drive and motivate for change. For me, it's just a call to people to stop the destruction. The next thing will be ensuring that we set aside enough land for elephants to move. Routes for elephants to navigate where they don't come into conflict with people. That means organising ourselves better. We could learn so much from them. Let's try to understand each other as species and make sure that we can have a future together. We're on the edge of a whole series of discoveries, I think, about their brains and about the way they perceive the world. Really, at this stage, ask an elephant, what are you thinking? I wish we could.