Elephant conservation in Thailand

Thailand is a popular tourist destination. So it’s a good destination for our Geo Quiz as well. But while most tourists head for Bangkok, or the beaches of Phuket, we’re heading to one of Thailand’s northern provinces.

It’s best-known for its ceramics factories, national parks, and especially its Elephant Conservation Center. It’s the perfect place for an animal psychologist to study cooperation and problem solving — on a large scale.

“And these are capacities that we always used to think were uniquely human but in fact it turns out they’re not so by studying species such as elephants we get a greater understanding of how intelligence evolved”.

Do you know the name of that northern Thai province?

The answer is the province of Lampang in northern Thailand. It’s home to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center where comparative psychologist Joshua Plotnik (Department of Experimental Psychology, at the University of Cambridge, England) has been studying elephant cooperation. Anchor Marco Werman gets details on the research into how elephants sense or think about cooperation.