Elephants are Extraordinary

• Elephants are very long-lived and exhibit a high degree of social complexity.
• Elephants live in an unusually large social network with close and enduring cooperative social relationships.
• Elephants have very large and complex brains with the greatest volume of cerebral cortex available for cognitive processing of all land mammals.
• Elephants have unusually good memory, and they accumulate and retain social and ecological knowledge for decades.
• Elephants are able to make subtle discriminations of sound, scent and touch.
• Elephant development includes social learning and behavioral innovation, which is manifested in the use and modification of rudimentary tools and in vocal learning.
• Elephants are self-aware and capable of empathy
• Elephants produce a wide range of vocalizations many of which contain frequencies below the level of human hearing and some of which can transmit over kilometers.
• Elephants detect earth tremors, thunderstorms, the hoof beats of distant animals and the vocalizations of their companions seismically discriminating between them through their sensitive feet.
• Elephants refer to different threats with specific alarm calls.
• Elephants create and use names for one another.
• Elephants have an extraordinary sense of smell, which is said to be more discriminating than that of a bloodhound.
• Elephants are a keystone species playing a pivotal role in structuring both plant and animal communities and contributing to biodiversity through seed dispersal and the creation of habitat mosaics.
• Elephants prune vegetation as they move and their dung is home to thousands of small invertebrates, who in turn are food for birds, reptiles and small mammals. Many important ecosystems would partly collapse if the elephants disappear.
• The elephant is a flagship species and being such "charismatic mega-vertebrates" they play a vital role as a symbol for conservation of wildlife and nature.
• Elephants are significant contributors to tourism revenue in many countries in Africa and Asia.
• Elephants are a substantial part of our cultural and historical heritage and they give us pleasure to behold.

While many other species may rival elephants in one capability or another there are few that equal or surpass elephants in the totality of their social and behavioral complexity.