Batyr | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

Batyr (May 24, 1970 – August 26, 1993) was an Asian elephant claimed to be able to use a large amount of meaningful human speech. Living in a zoo in Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, Batyr was reported as having a vocabulary of more than 20 phrases. A recording of Batyr saying "Batyr is good", his name and using words such as drink and give was played on Kazakh state radio and on the Soviet Central Television programme Vremya in 1980. Like all cases of talking animals, these claims are subject to the observer-expectancy effect. Born on May 24, 1970, at Almaty Zoo, Batyr lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo at Karaganda in Kazakhstan. He died in 1993. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian elephants (a subspecies of the Asian elephant) and was the second child of his mother, Palm, (1959–1998) and father, Dubas, (1959–1978) presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The first baby elephant (Batyr's elder brother) was killed by his mother immediately after birth on May 15, 1968. Batyr, whose name is a Turkic word meaning 'dashing equestrian', 'man of courage' or 'athlete', was first alleged to speak just before New Year's Day in the winter of 1977 when he was seven years old. Zoo employees were the first to notice his "speech", but he soon delighted zoo-goers at large by appearing to ask his attendants for water and regularly praising or (infrequently) chastising himself. By 1979, his fame as the "speaking elephant" had spread in the wake of various mass-media stories about his abilities, many containing considerable fabrication and wild conjecture. Batyr's case was also included in several books on animal behaviour, and in the proceedings of several scientific conferences. These developments drew a spate of zoo visitors, and brought the offer of an exchange—Batyr for a rare bonobo—from the Czechoslovak Circus; an offer rejected by the zoo's employees. A. N.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (3)

Alex (parrot)

Alex (18 May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment.

Animal language

Animal languages are forms of non-human animal communication that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds or movements. Signing among animals may be considered complex enough to be a form of language if the inventory of signs is large. The signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition (as opposed to relatively automatic conditioned behaviors or unconditioned instincts, usually including facial expressions).

Washoe (chimpanzee)

Washoe (c. September 1965 – October 30, 2007) was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition. Washoe learned approximately 350 signs of ASL, also teaching her adopted son Loulis some signs. She spent most of her life at Central Washington University. Washoe was born in West Africa in 1965. She was captured for use by the US Air Force for research for the US space program.