Given sufficient inducement many of the cleverer mammals will learn to
do very sensible things, and no one is wise enough to say that they
never understand what they are doing. Yet it is certain that trained
animals often exhibit pieces of behaviour which are not nearly so clever
as they look. The elephant at the Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester used
to collect pennies from benevolent visitors. When it got a penny in its
trunk it put it in the slot of an automatic machine which delivered up a
biscuit. When a visitor gave the elephant a halfpenny it used to throw
it back with disgust. At first sight this seemed almost wise, and there
was no doubt some intelligent appreciation of the situation. But it was
largely a matter of habituation, the outcome of careful and prolonged
training. The elephant was laboriously taught to put the penny in the
slot and to discriminate between the useful pennies and the useless
halfpennies. It was not nearly so clever as it looked.