And he had spent his whole career in the forest of Tamil Nadu, south India, looking after the numerous elephants in their timber camps. And so I asked if it’d be possible for me to go down and see the elephants. And I did, he took me around and then I asked him if he’d be willing to work with me on some experimental approaches to, to looking at, at the relationship between keeper character, mahut characteristics and elephant performance to see if there were good and bad hoots and that sort of thing. So we worked up a protocol to enumerate the various commands that the elephants could perform and the command words and signals that were used. So we ended up with this lexicon of terminology that the hoots used to command the elephants. And then we measured the, the response time in the elephants to the hoots running the elephants through a performance trial like you would give a border collie at a performance trial meet. And so we gathered a lot of data and we found out that there were significant differences in the repertory in different parts of India and Nepal. And we found out that there was a lot of variation in the responsiveness of the elephants to the commands.
