Aristotle once described the elephant as an "animal that surpasses all other animals in intelligence and thought"; modern ethologists also generally agree that the elephant is one of the most intelligent animals.

The most amazing thing about elephants is their memory: they can remember something for a long time, even for decades. So in English, to praise a person's good memory, he will say "have a memory like an elephant!", or describe himself like an elephant never forgets.

Elephants make good use of their long-term memory to adapt to difficult situations. As a group animal in a matriarchal society, elephant herds are generally led by older female elephants to live with other female elephants and baby elephants. And this "matriarch" can always find a suitable habitat for the ethnic group with the memory accumulated over the decades.

Some surveys have found that although a pond in the desert only appears every 8 months. However, in the absence of water sources, a group of elephants led by a "matriarch" in her thirties can always find this "remote" pond without hesitation and at regular intervals. In contrast, due to poaching, the elephant herds with only young "patriarchs" often cannot find suitable habitats and lack sufficient forage or water sources, resulting in mortality rates that more than double compared to other elephant herds.

In addition, long-term memory is also reflected in the social relationships of elephants. Male elephants need to live independently as adults, but they identify individuals through their urine, remembering their mother's scent for decades to avoid inbreeding that would produce unhealthy offspring.

Not just smell, elephants are also very sensitive to sound. Elephants that communicate with each other through infrasound waves can accurately identify the differences between hundreds of elephants within a radius of one kilometer in the different and mixed sound wave frequencies, and find their familiar sounds. For example, it's as difficult as finding your classmates in a crowded playground at school.

In addition to the magical long-term memory, the intelligence of elephants is gradually revealed under the exploration of animal behaviorists. One of the biggest concerns for researchers about intelligence is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the question of "Can I know who I am?" To put it in a simpler way: Do elephants see themselves in mirrors?

Studies have shown that 18-month-old human babies, bottlenose dolphins, and chimpanzees can recognize themselves in the mirror, so what animal has self-awareness? The researchers turned their attention to intelligent elephants.

But unlike other animals, large elephants need a mirror large enough and free to inspect the structure of the mirror to determine that the "elephant" in the mirror is not real. To this end, the researchers prepared a 2.5-meter-high super-large mirror and drew a clear white cross as a mark next to the elephant's own invisible eyes to see if the elephant could complete the "mirror test" ".

Elephant Happy was indeed "confused" when he saw the mirror for the first time. She went straight to the mirror and stared at it for ten seconds. After that, she observed the mirror back and forth several times. After repeated confirmation, she began to "touch" the marked position with her nose - the "mirror test" was successful! Later, the elephants Maxine and Patty also entered the yard to be tested in turn. Although they "touched" the markings less frequently, this still shows that the elephants are self-aware creatures.

Elephants are also good at solving problems in their own daily lives. Observation found that in Kenya's Mount Elgon National Park, a group of elephants always like to run into caves. Unexpectedly, they are going to mine! Many animals will lick the salty ore to replenish their salt, but elephants are more straightforward. They choose to use their strong tusks to smash the salty ore in the cave, and then chew and swallow to replenish the body's salt. The survey also found that they have a particularly large appetite. A young male elephant can eat 14 to 20 kilograms of salty soil in 45 minutes, so much so that researchers found that the caves here were actually dug by elephants over thousands of years.