The Self-Awareness of Elephants

I know I’m an inveterate nerd, but I absolutely love stuff like this:

Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness, researchers now report.

…One of the first things animals capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors do is try exploring the other side of the mirror. Elephants Maxine and Patty did this: they swung their trunks over and behind the wall on which the mirror was mounted, kneeled in front of it to get their trunks under and behind it, and even attempted to physically climb the wall. Remarkably, the elephants did not appear to at first mistake their reflections as strangers and try to greet them, as many animals that can recognize themselves normally do.

…As they begin to understand mirrors, animals that can recognize their reflections try repeating actions in front of it. The elephants, for example, waved their trunks around and moved their heads in and out of the mirror view.

Finally, once animals recognize reflections as their own, they use mirrors to investigate their own bodies. On more than one occasion, the elephants stuck their trunks into their mouths in front of the mirror, and Maxine used her trunk to pull her ear slowly toward the mirror.

There are pictures and video of the elephants investigating the mirror at the link.

One of the researchers, Diana Reiss, who’s a senior cognitive research scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Brooklyn, said that self-awareness is a trait “common to and independently evolved by animals with large, complex brains, complex social lives, and known capacities for empathy and altruism.”

Is anyone else ready to start a campaign to demand that the Republicans stop using the elephant as their party logo?