The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

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.