‘1 Rabbit Saw 9 Elephants’ Riddle: Here’s How Many Animals Are Going to the River

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A riddle that’s trending on social media is the “1 Rabbit Saw 9 Elephants” riddle. You may have seen it on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, with people asking just how many animals were at the river total. Read on to learn the answer and learn more about the riddle.

The word-based riddle typically reads like this:

1 rabbit saw 9 elephants while going to the river. Every elephant saw 3 monkeys going to the river. Each monkey had 1 parrot on each hand. How many animals are going to the river?

Some people start out the riddle by saying: “The battle of Mathematics and English. Let’s see who can get it right.”

Are you ready to read the riddle’s answer? It gets a little confusing and there are arguments for some alternative options depending on just how the riddle is worded. We’ll also include an example for a “6 elephants” version later in the story.

Here’s the Answer to the Riddle

10 animals are going to the river. 

(Note: If the rabbit sees 6 elephants and the rest of the riddle is worded exactly the same, the answer would still be 10 animals.) 

So how does this break down? Well, first you should remember that the elephants are a trick. The riddle is looking for “how many animals are going to the river?” and the riddle never says the elephants are going to the river. It only says that the rabbit sees the elephants while on the way to the river.

So we know for sure that one rabbit is going to the river, but NOT nine elephants.

Then we know that every elephant saw three monkeys going to the river. This is where things get confusing. Some people think this means that each elephant saw three distinct monkeys, but we’re actually not told that. Most people believe we’re left to imply that the elephants all saw the same three monkeys going to the river.

Then each monkey has a parrot on each hand. A monkey has two hands, which means two parrots per monkey. There are three monkeys, so that’s six parrots. In other words: 1 Rabbit + 3 Monkeys + 6 Parrots = 10 animals going to the river.

Some versions of the riddle say that each monkey “holds one bird in its hands,” which would change the final answer to 7, not 10.

Some versions of this riddle change up the numbers altogether, so you’d have to do the math all over again (the same way) to get the right answer. For example, there’s this version: “One rabbit saw 6 elephants while going to the river. Every elephant saw 2 monkeys going towards the river. Every monkey holds 1 parrot in their hands. How many animals are going towards the river?” The answer to this one is 5 animals.

Arguments can be made for the original riddle having a different answer. Maybe you want to believe that the elephants each saw three distinct monkeys, which would mean that you had 27 monkeys and 54 birds, leading to 82 animals. But the way the riddle is worded should lead you to believe that the elephants all saw the same three monkeys. Otherwise it would say something like “each elephant saw three different monkeys.” Also, if we go with the interpretation of the elephants seeing different monkeys with the way the original riddle is worded, then there’s no way to know how many monkeys the elephants saw, since some might have seen the same three while others saw different monkeys. It’s safest to just read the riddle as saying there are three monkeys total going to the river.

To make things a little more confusing, some versions of this riddle use “to” and “toward” in it, with the monkeys “going towards the river” and the rabbit “going to the river.” It reads like this:

1 Rabbit saw 9 Elephants while going to the river. Every Elephant saw 3 Monkeys going toward the river. Each Monkey had 1 parrot in each hand. How many Animals are going to the river?

For that version, one might argue that it’s only asking which are going “to” the river, and “toward” the river is different. So the answer to the riddle above might be argued to be one (only the rabbit is going “to” the river.) Unless you argue that to and toward are the same, leaving you with the same answer.

Then there’s this very similar but slightly different version:

1 Rabbit saw 9 Elephants while going to the river. Every Elephant saw 3 Monkeys going toward the river. Each Monkey had 1 parrot in each hand. How many Animals are going toward the river?

See the difference? Instead of asking how many are going to the river, it asks how many are going toward the river. One might argue that going to the river is another version of going toward the river, and thus the answer is still 10. Others might say you need to only count how many are going “toward” the river, making the answer 9.

To make things more confusing, some people argue that birds aren’t animals. But this is not true. There are five main kingdoms of living creatures (six in the U.S.): Monerans, Protists, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. (In the U.S., it’s Archaea, Bacteria, Protists, Fungi, and Animals.) Birds are clearly animals. This confusion arises from some people getting the “birds aren’t animals” part mixed up with birds not being mammals, which is true. Birds are actually classified as Aves, not mammals (Mammalia.) But both mammals and birds are classified as animals. Animals are broken down into six basic categories: invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

That gets us a little off track, though. In short, the answer to the original riddle as worded is 10.

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