Quick Take
- Dogs are famously trainable, but a new study reveals giraffes leave them in the dust on a basic cognitive test. See the study results →
- Researchers discovered a specific evolutionary pressure that may explain why giraffes developed this surprising mental ability.
- Giraffes outranked several well-studied animals on the math test, though two species still beat them, and one of those species will surprise you. See how giraffes ranked →
- Giraffes don't just crunch numbers. Their communication toolkit is far stranger and more sophisticated than most people realize. Explore giraffe communication →
Giraffes are incredibly cool creatures. In addition to having extremely long necks and a highly mobile tongue that allows them to eat from tall trees, they are actually super smart as well. In fact, one recent study found that they have the ability to do basic math!
A June 2026 study in Nature’s Scientific Reports by researchers from the University of Barcelona, the University of Leipzig, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tested four giraffes with three different experiments to determine if they could comprehend basic arithmetic principles.
In the study, researchers had two containers full of carrots in front of the giraffes. They covered the containers and added or subtracted carrots, then prompted the giraffe to pick one to eat, testing to see if they would correctly pick the one with more food.
What Did the Study Reveal?
About 68 percent of the time, the giraffes were able to select the container with more carrots after the researcher added some, which is better than what could be chalked up to random chance.
Giraffes were able to tell which food container had more carrots in a recent study.
©FamVeld/Shutterstock.com
They weren’t as adept at understanding when carrots were removed from the containers or transferred from one container to the other. However, their ability to choose the container of food that held more carrots was impressive, according to researchers, and showed that they were able to handle more complex calculations.
The researchers also noted that the giraffes performed better than animals in other studies, such as dogs, lemurs, tamarins, zebrafish, and horses, but not as well as orangutans or pigeons. They wrote in part, “[Giraffes] may be capable of mentally tracking quantity manipulations, likely using perceptual memory–based mechanisms, to identify the location of the larger food quantity.”
This could be due to evolutionary pressures, such as the need for giraffes to remember where they previously found food so they can return to those locations, or other similar requirements. Further research is needed to understand how else giraffes use this mental memory and simple calculations, and to discover which other animals are able to perform at a higher cognitive level than previously assumed.
Giraffes Also Have Excellent Communication Skills
If giraffes attended school, they would excel in both language arts and math classes. After all, these amazing animals communicate with each other in many different ways, such as hissing to ward off predators or correct their young, bellowing to look for offspring, humming and snorting to talk to each other, and other sounds. There are even special sounds baby giraffes make to signal when they are hungry.
