TOW #5: Elephants Get the Point of Pointing, Study Shows by Carl Zimmer

           To your average human, the action of pointing may seem like second nature, but there is much more sophistication to the act then meets the eye. Most babies learn this movement by the time they turn one and they use it in order to silently draw your attention to an object. Pointing is a rare ability in the animal kingdom; surprisingly, elephants may possess this simple gift. In Elephants Get the Point of Pointing, Study Shows by Carl Zimmer, it is revealed that elephants may understand pointing. Biologist, Richard Byrne, and his graduate student, Anna Smet, conduct a simple pointing test. The test is that they will put food in one of two buckets and point to the one with food in it. Then they will wait and see what bucket the elephant would stick its trunk into. With two months and eleven elephants the test was completed. 

Zimmer, a biology writer for the New York Times, allows readers to see the test and the results by going through the experiment with them.  Any reader with a curiosity for life and nature would enjoy this piece. With something as fascinating as elephants holding a human characteristic, who wouldn’t want to read this article? Zimmer’s purpose in writing this piece was to show readers the new discovery on how elephants, most likely, get the point of pointing.

The author uses counterarguments and quotes in order to achieve his purpose, which I believe was successful. At the end of the piece, Zimmer quotes an expert on elephant cognition named Diana Reiss who points out flaws Byrne and Smet’s experiment. These flaws include how the elephants used were from an elephant camp and how they might have learned pointing from their human caretakers. I also think that by quoting Byrne and Smet, Zimmer was able to enhance his article by allowing the biologists’ voices to come through as well as his own. Both of these strategies help Zimmer achieve him purpose of showing how elephants get the point of pointing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/science/elephants-get-the-point-of-pointing-study-shows.html?_r=0