Elephants know their sums

Yesterday while reading newspaper (The Hindu) one particular news in the last page caught my attention. It was titled "Elephants know their sums"



Below is the article from hindu:

Tokyo: Asian elephants can do mathematics, and have proved their skill at addition in an experiment with their favourite food, a Japanese researcher said on monday.

One elephant was 87 percent correct and the other was 69 percent right in months of addition exercises involving single digits, says Naoko Irie of the University of Tokyo.

In one test, researchers dropped three apples into one bucket and five into another bucket and then added two apples to each. Five times out of six, Ashya, a 30 - year old female elephant at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo, chose the bucket with seven apples rather than five although see or feel the inside of the containers.

The other elephant, 38 - year - old Mito from Kyoto, was also right five times in a test involving oranges.

Ms. irie; a doctal candidate in cognition and behavioural science, said she was surprised at the elephants' mathematical skills. "I couldn't believe it at first," she said. "They could instantly compare numbers like six and five."

Each animal was tested using their favourite food. Elephants have roughly the same life span as humans.

Many animals are known to be able to choose te bigger of two numbers. Their perfomances, however, usually decline if the numbers are big or the gap between the two numbers is small.

I believe all animals know maths. Only human beings are proud of it because they have conventional methods in maths.