Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Time 0:04:16
Elephant Shower Time
- At the Berlin Zoo, Mary, a 54-year-old elephant, learned to use a water hose to give herself showers.
- On average, she’d pick up the hose within five seconds of it being turned on and shower for seven minutes.
- This behavior was novel and hadn’t been observed in elephants before.
- After her shower, she would drop the hose, indicating an understanding of its purpose. Transcript: Rachel Feltman So this story is about three elephants at the Berlin Zoo. Mary, Pengfa, and Anshali. Mary is this handsome, respectable woman of 54. And Pengfa is also an adult. I want to say she’s in her 30s. Don’t quote me on that, though. And then Anshali is Pengfa’s child, 12 years old, little rapscallion. We’ll get into that more later. So this all started because as part of their morning routine at the Berlin Zoo, these elephants were showered by keepers with a water hose. And then they had access to water, you know, all day to drink and to spray themselves. But the hose would only be turned on, you know, while the zookeepers were using it. And researchers who were hanging out watching these elephants for interesting reasons I will get to later, turns out they are a very special, interesting group. But they noticed that Mary wasn’t just spraying herself with water using her trunk, which is something elephants do when they have access to water. They do lots of grooming. They do lots of stuff with their trunks. They’ll like give themselves like little dust and mud baths. So that’s not unusual at all. But they found that she was also taking the hose and holding it in her trunk to give herself showers, which is not something they had ever seen an elephant do before. Basically, when the hose was turned on, she would pick it up on average within five seconds, and then she would shower for an average of seven minutes. Yeah, she was like, it’s shower time. Yeah. And seven minutes, which like I feel like for an animal that doesn’t shower, seven minutes is like, that’s a luxurious shower, girl. I understand.