WEPA - Working Elephant Programme of Asia - Elephant Training: Frequently Asked Questions

Working Elephant Programme of Asia
Science-based, animal-friendly methods for training and handling of working elephants

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Elephant Training: Frequently Asked Questions

Does an elephant obey you only if he thinks about you as the boss? How do you train an elephant to be as brave as possible? Find out these and many more on this page.

1. Elephants have thick skin. Does this mean they don’t feel that much pain when they are hit with a stick or a metal hook?

2. Do you need to show an elephant that you are the boss in order to be able to train and control him?

3. That elephant seems not to obey his trainers. Surely he understands what the trainers want him to do and is just being stubborn?

4. If an elephant has been trained with food rewards, will you need to keep giving treats during a working day too?

5. If an elephant is used in dangerous work, like arresting poachers, does he need rough training to be tough enough to face such frightening situations?

6. I have watched a trainer start training an elephant with the Positive Learning Method, and the progress looks really slow. Shouldn’t it be faster in order to be used in professional elephant training?

2. Do you need to show an elephant that you are the boss in order to be able to train and control him?

The concept of dominance is one of the most widespread misconceptions about animal training. Elephants and some other species trained by people, like horses, do have social hierarchies in the wild, but these hierarchies govern only some aspects of their lives, like who is going to give up if there is only one piece of desired food. Many other aspects of their behaviour and brain functions, such as learning to do a specific thing on a specific cue, are based on completely different interactions that have nothing to do with social dominance and bosses.

When people train animals with methods based on dominance and coercion, a large part of the learning actually takes place despite of the dominance expressed by the trainer, not because of it. This is because a major part of the learning process is about forming associations - for example an association between hearing a specific command word and performing a specific action. Even when the trainer believes his success is due to his dominance, the animal actually learns simply from having enough many repetitions of a word connected to an action.

Although many trainers don’t realize it, a dominance-based approach to training actually slows down the learning process. When an animal experiences pain and fear during training, part of the animal’s attention is focused on dealing with its own flight responses, instead on the focusing on the associations the trainer wants it to learn. Additionally, if a trainer believes that dominance is the key, he does not pay detailed enough attention to the precise timing and clarity of signals that actually are the aspect in training that the animal learns from. These are some of the reasons why Positive Learning Method and other similar methods achieve the end result of a fully trained animal in a shorter time compared to coercion-based methods.

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1. Elephants have thick skin. Does this mean they don’t feel that much pain when they are hit with a stick or a metal hook?

The skin of a grown-up elephant is about two to three centimetres (one inch) thick. However, the thickness of skin does not affect an animal’s capability of feeling pain. This is because pain receptors, the nerve endings that send the signal of pain to the brain, are located on the surface of the skin, not under it. According to research, the perception of pain in all mammals seems to be remarkably similar, regardless of thickness of skin.

You can also examine the question by phrasing it the other way around. The skin of small animals such as mice is thinner than ours. If they are hit, is the pain they feel more intense than ours? Intuitively, most people would say no, and research also indicates that the pain perception of mice is about as accurate as that of other mammals.

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3. That elephant seems not to obey his trainers. Surely he understands what the trainers want him to do and is just being stubborn?

When an elephant is born, it does not understand any words of any human language. Nor does it know which tasks people want to use working elephants for. It is easy for us to imagine that the animal knows what it is supposed to do, since it is so evident to us. As any animal, the elephant needs to separately learn each word or tactile cue, as well as what are the specific actions that people want the elephant to associate to each of these commands.

If an animal refuses to do what it is expected to do, one of the most common reasons is that it does not have a clear enough picture in its head as to what to do when hearing this specific word or feeling this type of touch. Punishing the animal will not help, since after the punishment the animal will still not know what it is supposed to do. Additionally, the pain and fear will make it more difficult for it to focus on the task. Instead, making sure the animal is in a calm and relaxed state of mind, and then ensuring that the signals given by the handler are clear enough and that the handler is not accidentally giving some contradicting signals at the same time, often is enough to make the animal understand.

If the animal still remains confused, the solution is re-training the part of the task that is not working, making sure that the signals given during training are clear and the motivation, such as rewarding or pressure-release, are timed precisely so that they immediately follow those actions of the animal that they are supposed to be associated with.

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4. If an elephant has been trained with food rewards, will you need to keep giving treats during a working day too?

In the Positive Learning Method, food rewards are used only in the initial stages of training each new task. After this, the use of treats is gradually phased out, and the training continues without them. A working elephant will thus not require a separate "payment" for each thing it does. However, it is a good idea to occasionally reward the elephant with a treat, or example when performing an especially difficult task, as this will further imporve the elephant's reliability at work.

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5. If an elephant is used in dangerous work, like arresting poachers, does he need rough training to be tough enough to face such frightening situations?

Research with many species of animals has shown that the key to a brave animal, one that can remain calm and perform the work even in frightening situations, is in consistent training that does not involve pain nor fear during training. Thus, rough and painful training actually produces more fearful animals that are more likely to panic in difficult situations, as compared to animals trained by animal-friendly methods.

Another crucial factor of reliable performance is the trainer’s skill in forming such strong habits in the animal that it carries out the same task no matter what is happening around it. Thus, consistent and painless training coupled with a lot of repetition of each task is the way to produce elephants that work most reliably even under very challenging circumstances.

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6. I have watched a trainer start training an elephant with the Positive Learning Method, and the progress looks really slow. Shouldn’t it be faster in order to be used in professional elephant training?

The initial stages of training and animal with Positive Learning Method, or any other method based on the same principles, do look slow, while the later stages proceed very fast. This is because the tasks are first broken down to very small steps that are easy for the animal to grasp and do. This builds a foundation for the next stages of training, leading to a dramatic increase in the animal’s learning rate as the training proceeds.

What matters most to professional trainers, in terms of time spent, is the total time needed for training - from the beginning to the point when the animal is fully trained. Experience has consistently shown that this total time the training takes, for both elephants and other animals, is considerably shorter with the Positive Learning Method (and other methods similarly based on the techniques of positive reinforcement, pressure-release and habituation) as compared to methods based on the concepts of dominance, coercion, and inflicting pain.

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