Extraordinary elephant perception

When it comes to people, elephants can be very discriminating, especially those under human care in Southeast Asia. There is the story of the orphaned elephant who, at the age of 10, pulled her drowning mahout out of a lake after hearing his cries for help a kilometer away, or the dangerous 3-m-tall bull who would charge anyone who approached except the 160-cm wife of the village elder, who he would caress with his trunk as she fed him. This behavioral connection between elephants and ourselves is not the product of domestication—in the sense of artificial genetic selection—but born from individual life histories involving near constant human contact (1).