ELEPHANTS DEMONSTRATE SELF AWARENESS

"If you're happy and you know it, pat your head." That's how "Happy," a female elephant at the Bronx Zoo demonstrated self-awareness. She was trained to tap a red cross with her trunk. Then, after a researcher painted a red cross on her forehead and placed her in front of an eight-foot-tall mirror, she reached up with her trunk and tapped the target. Thus she passed the "mirror test", the industry standard for testing self-awareness in animals. Once thought to be the exclusive purview of humans, self-awareness has thus been discovered in chimpanzees and dolphins. Now elephants have joined this exclusive club. According to the report of this research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, other elephants in the study gave indications of self-awareness in front of the mirror, such as by opening the mouth wide and peering into its reflection in the mirror.