Animals and self-awarness

Cool vid, must share. I really think it’s an extraordinary display of training and mimicking than a display of self-awareness and elephant artistic interpretation. I am saying this based on the incredibly ‘human’ way of emphasis on lines and curves and the flower at the end. But… ultimately who knows… it might be a combination of both. Elephants are incredibly smart and beside humans, apes, and dolphins, they are the only animals to pass the self-recognition mirror test (there is a good paper by Plotnik et al discussing this), in this case I’d be curious to know to what extent elephant actually identifies its drawing as a symbolic representation of something (rather than lines that it has learned to trace).