You don’t need hands to be right- or left-handed. Many kinds of animals have shown a preference for using one side of their body or the other. They include apes, whales, dogs, cats, cows, toads, fish and even honeybees. Now, with data from a rather unsavory source, researchers have found evidence for “tuskedness” in elephants.
Although humans aren’t alone in having handedness, we do seem to have the most extreme bias as a species. Other animals seem more evenly divided between righties and lefties. In a study of wild Asian elephants, researchers found that that the animals had a strong rightward or leftward preference for how they used their trunks (trunkedness?). There was an even split between left-trunkers and right-trunkers, though.
Other researchers have suggested that elephants also have a tusk preference. They may use one tusk more than the other for tasks like stripping bark from trees, digging in ...
