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Supporting Data for “The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) in a human world: Factors that shape captive elephant-handler relationships”
The overarching theme of this thesis is to understand how elephant behavior is shaped by conditions in a human environment, and by their interactions with humans. Focusing on aspects of handler-elephant relationships, handler and elephant personality, elephant cognition and affect, I attempt to understand how these factors influence elephant behavior within a human environment. The findings of this research will directly contribute towards a deeper understanding of human-elephant interactions within captive environments and also handler and elephant welfare. It could also offer possible insight into how wild elephant behavior is influenced by these factors in human affected environments.
Chapter 2 focuses on how elephant-handler relationships are affected by human characteristics such as elephant-handling experience, years of working with their current animals; environmental characteristics such as temperature; and proximity characteristics such as distance from handler during tasks. Through an experimental approach I attempt to understand the influence of these factors on the response of the elephants towards their handlers in an ‘animal calling task’.
Chapter 3 centers around how handler and elephant personalities influence the elephant-handler relationship. Using three different questionnaires of elephant personality, handler personality and elephant-handler relationship scale, I get a handler’s perspective on how these factors influence the relationship they share with their animal.
Chapter 4 focuses on the affective state of the animal. For this chapter I used the method of Qualitative Behavior Assessments (QBA) which focuses on observed behavior, movement and body postures of the animal to determine affective states. The QBA was assessed through video recordings of individual elephants over a long-term duration. We were interested in the human perspective of the affective states of elephants.
Chapter 5 again focuses on determining affective states in elephants, through a cognitive approach. In this chapter I used Cognitive Bias Tests (CBT) which highlights how affective states can influence decision-making in elephants. Using an experimental approach we first exposed the elephants to cues associated with positive and negative affective states and then introduced ambiguous cues which lay between them. The elephants’ responses were recorded to understand how decision-making is affected by previous experiences with valence (attractiveness or aversion).
