Elephants Can Lend A Helping Trunk Rhetorical Analysis

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The video and the passages "Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk" and "Elephants Know When They Need a Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task", both have similarties on the subject of if elephants can help each other or not. In "Elephants Can Lend a Helping Trunk", the passage talks about how elephants know how to lend a hand when another elephant needs help. Rarely found in other species, elephants have higher levels of social cognition. Many experiments were tested, which led to the ongoing fact that Elephants can help each other when in need. Throughout the trials, the elephants would be released from the rope at different times from the other elephants. Doing this showed that elephants would wait for their partners to help them pull the food on the table. Sometimes however, some elephants were not able to do the trial. "When the partner couldn't do anything, the other one would just give up," Plotnik says. Which shows the elephants understood why the partner was needed, he adds. With these studies, scientists are able to see …show more content…

Instead of randomly releasing the elephants, the trials had a mahout(a keeper of an elephant). ... a mahout would walk with his elephant to the single available rope end and train his animal to pick up and pull the rope by using vocal commands. After training, they conducted the experiments. Two mahouts would stand at a release point with the elephants, and ...restrained them by touching the ear or front leg. This assured that both elephants would be calm, so the experiments could be done. Upon release, mahouts turned away from the elephants and remained silent to minimize chances for cuing, and in position behind the elephants for safety. Doing this helped the experiment by showing that the elephants were not trained by anyone and to show the experiment was all raw

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