Member Article

Dumbo not so dumb

New research suggests elephants are cleverer than humans when it comes to mental arithmetic.

Scientists developed a test which involved dropping varying numbers of apples into two buckets in front of the animals and then recording how often they could correctly choose the bucket holding the most fruit.

Sometimes the apples would be dropped in clusters of up to three or four at a time - forcing the elephants to keep running totals in their heads to keep count, reports the Sun.

The animals correctly picked the fullest bucket 74 percent of the time, with one of them - Ashya the Asian elephant - scoring an incredible 87 percent.

The exercises were filmed - so exactly the same test could be shown to humans - but our representatives in the maths contest managed a success rate of just 67 percent.

The discovery was made by Dr Naoko Irie from Tokyo University, using elephants at the city’s Ueno Zoo. She reckons it was a pretty tough test. “Even I get confused when I am dropping the apples into the buckets,” she said.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .