The current study tested six Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus ) on a means-end behavioral task of pulling a support to retrieve a distant object; a systematic replication of the Irie-Sugimoto et al. (2008) study. The paradigm was somewhat modified from the original research to accommodate a protected contact setting, reduce the total number of trials, and one condition was excluded. Each elephant was tested on three conditions of increasing difficulty. Specifically, subjects were asked to select from a choice of two trays where one intact tray was baited with a highly-valued produce item and the other was A) empty; B) baited adjacent to the tray; and C) baited on the far side of a break in the tray. Results indicated that the elephants met or exceeded the criteria established for conditions A and B, but performed at chance levels on condition C. These data are contrasted with those of the original study where one elephant met criteria for all three conditions. We discuss potentially relevant variables affecting performance including differences in visual access to the trays, motivation levels, and training style.

The use of novel objects as environmental enrichment devices is a key aspect of many environmental enrichment programs, regardless of whether the animals being enriched are housed in aquaria, zoos, or laboratories. The effectiveness of novel objects as enrichment devices depends on a number of factors, many of which are based on findings from comparative psychology. For example, the literature on habituation predicts that an object that is always in an animal’s environment will be less interesting than a similar object that is available only on an intermittent basis. To test the hypothesis that type of exposure to objects affects the objects’ enriching qualities, we exposed sixteen animals from ten different species to novel objects in two different conditions. In the first condition, animals were exposed to a novel object for a total of 120 min, 60 min at a time on two separate occasions. Approximately three weeks later, the animals were once again given a total of 120 min to interact with the object that they had experienced in the first condition, but the amount of time the object was available per session was much more variable. The results demonstrate that variable presentations are more likely to maintain the enriching qualities of objects, consistent with the literature on habituation.