Asian Elephant Expertly Uses a Water Hose to Give Herself a Shower

An Asian elephant named Mary, who lives at the Berlin Zoo learned how to wash herself using a water hose. According to a study conducted by a team at the Brecht Lab at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Mary was quite adept at using the hose as a flexible shower head for her whole body.

The researchers found that Mary systematically showers her body, coordinating the water hose with her limbs. She usually grasps the hose behind its tip to use it as a stiff shower head. To reach her back, she switches to a lasso strategy, grasping the hose farther up and swinging it over her body. When presented with a larger and heavier hose, Mary used her trunk to wash instead of the bulkier and less useful hose.

Unfortunately, this small luxury doesn’t come without challenges. It seems another Asian elephant named Anchali, who is the daughter of banana peeler Phang Pa and much younger than Mary, decided that she wanted the hose for herself and would stop at nothing to get it. This interaction was so interesting to the researchers that the Brecht Lab put out a press release.

The two elephants showed aggressive interactions around showering time, the researchers say. At one point, Anchali started pulling the hose toward herself and away from Mary, lifting and kinking it to disrupt water flow. While they can’t be sure of Anchali’s intentions, it looked a lot like the elephant was displaying a kind of second order tool use behavior, disabling a tool in more conventional use by a fellow elephant, perhaps as an act of sabotage.

As this behavior went on, Brecht became more convinced that something was afoot between the two pachyderms.

Brecht explains that the elephants are well trained not to step on hoses, lest the keepers scold them. As a result, he says, they almost never do that. The researchers suspect that’s why Anchali has come up with more challenging workarounds to stop the water from flowing during Mary’s showers. When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary..