Elephant Cooperative Skills

In the article “Elephants Can Lend A Helping Trunk”, and the passage “Elephants Know When They Need A Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task” they both talk about how the elephants try to achieve a collective goal. The elephants worked with a helping trunk to test and achieve this goal and the mahouts, or elephant trainers would test how the elephants use their cooperative skills. Their task was to use their and rope-pulling skills and work together as a team. Overall, in the article “Elephants Can Lend A Helping Trunk”, and the passage “Elephants know When They Need A Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task” show similarities and differences to the video.

In the video “Elephants Show Cooperation” it shows the elephants working together and pulling the ropes to get the corn. In the second trial, the elephants worked together and pulled the ends of the rope to get the corn. In the last trial, the first elephant did not wait for the other, so it started pulling the rope until it slipped loose and they couldn’t get
The materials used were two elephants to go down two separate lanes to get to the board where they had to pull the ropes. The ropes then pulled the sliding table which held the bowls full of corn, which was their treat for accomplishing this task. The chart showed how many trials they did and their success rate.
All data was recorded from two video cameras. It’s discovered that the elephants have the knowledge to have cooperative skills. The article “Elephants Lend a Helping Trunk” states, “The ability to recognize that you sometimes need a little help from your friends is a sign of higher social cognition, psychologist say, and is rarely found in other species.” This line in the article shows that elephants are aware when they need the help of other elephants to be successful and get their task