Tow #5 "Brainy Elephants: One More Way They're as Smart as Humans"

"Brainy Elephants: One More Way They're as Smart as Humans" is a Times article written by Veronique Greenwood, a journalist that has frequently written articles for Time about animals, marine life, and anthropology. Greenwood establishes credibility with her audience from her experience with related topics. However, she does not establish automatic ethos because she is not well-known enough for readers to recognize her name.

Greenwood seems to target this article for an audience that is interested in psychology, animals, and their interaction with humans. In the article, she primarily focuses on the gesture of pointing and how elephants respond to it. The article is introduced with the explanation that pointing is an "extremely complex cognitive skill". It indicates an understanding that not only do individuals have thoughts in their own heads but others around them have different thought and may share them. It may be simple to humans but that's only because we learn to recognize the motion when we are infants. In Zimbabwe, psychology graduate student, Anna Smelt, performed an experiment with 11 elephants in the area. She studied the effect of pointing at a specific food bucket on the decision of elephants to recognize the gesture. Smelt tried a variety of pointing positions and the the elephants chose the bucket indicated by Smelt a greater proportion of time compared to the empty bucket. With these results, Greenwood makes the argument that are extremely intelligent animals, possible even just as smart as humans. She also disproves the counterargument that elephants may have learned pointing from humans by stating that if this were true, elephants held in captivity the longest would be better at pointing than newcomers, which is not true. Furthermore, Greenwood concedes, even if elephants did somehow learn pointing from humans, "they still are a step ahead of any other species researchers have tested, who have never made the connection between pointing and the target".

Greenwood makes an effective argument by connecting the elephants' recognition of pointing to humans and addressing the counterargument with solid evidence and explanation. Her article is intriguing to elephant and animal lovers alike.