This Elephant Uses a Hose to Give Herself a Shower Every Day

In the Berlin Zoo, Mary demonstrated another example of clever elephantine tool use while another animal exhibited a form of mischief with a hose that resembled a prank.

Elephants are serious about self care. To stay cool, and protect their skin, they wallow in mud, bathe in dust and use their trunks to spray themselves with water.

Now, an Asian elephant named Mary, who lives at the Berlin Zoo, has developed a more advanced technique, using a large hose to give herself a shower.

Mary’s hose-wielding appears to be the latest example of tool use by animals, researchers say in a paper that was published Friday in the journal Current Biology.

“Mary is so superb at showering,” said Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin and an author of the paper.

Mary wasn’t the only elephant who proved handy with a hose. A youngster named Anchali developed two different techniques for interrupting the flow of water through the hose — and thus, Mary’s showers.

The observation raises a provocative possibility: By disabling the tool Mary was using, Dr. Brecht thinks, Anchali was engaged in a “kind of a sabotage behavior.”