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Behaviors reveal sophisticated tool use and possible “pranking” among pachyderms
- blitzar 2y ago> Anchali figured out she could interrupt her colleague’s showers by picking the hose up with her trunk and kinking it to stop the water flow. The old tricks are the best tricks. Now wait for them to point the nozzle at their face and release.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoAnd in 3 generations, elephants will be producing sexy carwash videos for each other on Only Pachyderms.
- efitz 2y agoOnly ‘Fants
- kridsdale1 2y agoThis is as good a spot as any to inform the crowd that female elephants have shockingly human-like breasts. Go ahead and look it up.
- ninalanyon 2y agoWhy is it shocking?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 2y agoWell, this is going to be my new ice-breaker at the next party I don't want to be at.
- torbengee 2y agoThank you.
- elliotwagner 2y agoI wonder whether they feel some kind of enjoyment from these kinds of actions
- diegolas 2y agoi can guarantee you horses can and do annoy people for fun
- frostburg 2y agoAnectodally elephants do things like hiding and revaling objects for no apparent reason other than comical effect. One could build elaborate evolutionary fitness reasons for this, but I mean...
- deadbabe 2y agoElephants that make other elephants laugh get laid more often.
- HPsquared 2y agoOf course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.
- thanksgiving 2y agoI think it is also important to note here that apparently not all humans understand humor either or understand it differently or something.
- roenxi 2y agoHumour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is. It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
- _1tem 2y agoSince when is using a hose as a shower considered "sophisticated tool use"?
- aziaziazi 2y agoSophisticated is a synonym of advanced. In elephant point of view, hose and shower are definitely sophisticated (=advanced) tools. While they may experience it regularly, they usually dont operate them. Like humans with airplanes.
- bell-cot 2y agoBy "average animal" standards, it's quite sophisticated. And these day - clicky headlines suggesting advanced intelligence in charismatic animals are great for paying the bills.
- nkrisc 2y agoWhen it’s an elephant doing so. It would not be sophisticated for a human.
- itronitron 2y agoFor a human, it could be considered a developmental milestone.
- nkrisc 2y agoThat's a good point. For a sufficiently young human it would be considered sophisticated.
- imp0cat 2y agoWould it be considered more advanced if it was using it as a password cracking tool? ;)
- jamaicanindian 2y agoFor HN it is, as most tech guys /coders don't even shower after they arrived somewhere from their bike commute.
- komali2 2y ago> Mary is “left-trunked”—the equivalent of left-handed in humans—so holding the hose made it easier for her to reach her left side. She tended to spray her right side with her trunk, because she preferred to curve her proboscis that way. I can't believe this line, it's such a ridiculous and bizarre thing it sounds like a joke. The famously singly-appendeged creature can also be left-handed. Come on. Apparently though, not a joke, elephants really are right or left-"handed." https://dspace.spbu.ru/handle/11701/7138 https://dspace.spbu.ru/handle/11701/7138 "Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants." What a hilarious planet.
- masklinn 2y agoLateralisation is extremely common, snails are famously lateralised leading some of their predators to be such (they have jaws curving to one side, to better follow the shell). Snail shells mostly spiral to the right (90% IIRC, about the same as right handedness in humans) but in areas where lateralised predators are very common left-handed snails have a much higher presence, up to 30%.
- fragmede 2y agoMolecules have a handed-ness. everything from there on up is doomed to have that problem somewhere.
- dahart 2y agoWhy, what makes you think there’s any connection? Molecule handedness doesn’t affect animal handedness, they are completely independent things with completely independent mechanisms, and the materials in between animal and molecule (shell, bone, skin, nerves, vasculature, etc.) don’t have any known handedness. We already know that not everything has that problem.
- aziaziazi 2y agoI think they just see asymmetry as a parent of handednes. Bones and skin and so are not symmetric, as probably anything in the universe (but some specific molecules, atoms and crystals?)
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoElephants are really smart, and also quite emotional. They have been known to grieve, for very long periods of time, upon the death of babies or partners. Most animals get over it, fairly quickly.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThere was even a situation where they sought revenge. There was one person that was allegedly a retired 70-yo poacher, And a herd stomped them to death. Then at the funeral the elephants marched in and threw the corpse around. Then they singled out and destroyed that person's home. The destruction and collateral damage was surprisingly minimal, so this was an extremely targeted attack. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/watch-elephant-tramples-woman-to-death-in-odisha-herd-attacks-villagers/videoshow/92206888.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/watc... So yeah, elephants truly never forget. And some will make it their life mission to right the wrongs.
- konschubert 2y agoIt says in the article right there that they also destroyed other houses. I call bs.
- mrleinad 2y agoThey probably intercepted communications between those other houses and the target, and determined they should also pay the price.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoIf Monkey Hitman can be a TV show, then so can Mafia Elephants.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI did say "minimal", not "none". If I see a herd of a dozen elephants coming in a neighborhood, I'm sure expecting more than 1 house demolished with malice and 3 others damaged as collateral.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tonyvince7 2y agoI am from south India where a lot of wild elephants roam the villages and towns. When elephants come to roam the streets most people lock themselves in their homes and alert the forest division authorities. Someone I know once rescued a baby elephant from a trap set for boars. Every year, a herd of elephants stop by his gate and leave presents - mostly bananas and coconuts. They wait for him to come out, make a friendly gesture - folding their trunks in a specific way, and leave peacefully. Our elders tell us that elephants have memory and show gratitude and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time.
- ourmandave 2y ago...and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time. It's like a 6000 lb raven.
- not_your_mentat 2y agoThank god elephants can't fly.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoWhat a heartwarming story! Do you think it would be safe for him to approach that group and to touch them in a friendly way? I'm curious about their temperament regarding persons with whom that have some history.
- tonyvince7 2y agoUnlike the animals in the Zoo, the sight of a wild Asian elephant (males especially) with unaltered tusks is very intimidating. People don't dare to go near the wild ones even when they are friendly. The domesticated animals (ones used in temple proceedings) are a different story. They are still majestic but sadly in chains and strappings so people touch and feed them often. Google 'Pampadi Rajan' - name of a domesticated elephant
- tonyvince7 2y ago
- bratwurst3000 2y agomaybe someone knows the answer. how are elephants surviving german winters? can they withstand the cold or are they put inside for winter? that question popped in my mind. thanks
- rurban 2y agoThey are taken inside. Watching a lot of German zoo TV
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoDude. Even dogs get jealous of other dogs. How are we still in a time where we think animals don't have an inner life?
- INTPenis 2y agoI think it would be overwhelming if we really acknowledged how sentient animals are. I'm being completely honest here, I believe pigs and cows are just as intelligent as dogs. They're simply limited by their physical bodies and our understanding of their expressions. But I still won't go vegan. On an intelligent level I believe it's wrong to inseminate cows so they produce milk, but I still won't stop drinking it. Because I am lazy and comfortable in my ways. And that's what I believe most people are, even if they won't admit to it.
- kridsdale1 2y agoI think acknowledging the simultaneous truths that there is terrible suffering in the world, and that we are meant to perpetuate that suffering, is just maturity and wisdom. Morality is an artificial instrument of social control that minimizes human wars. Otherwise, all creatures are here to kill and breed.
- aziaziazi 2y agoI beg to differ: all creatures are here to breed. I’ll be surpised to ear about creatures that kill as an end instead of a mean but hey, there’s still to discover.
- ConspiracyFact 2y agoOne in every ten thousand or so human males either kills other human beings for pleasure or would if they could. This may be specific to humans, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that there are serial killers in other species. Or rather, would-be serial killers, because without tool use an animal would have to be a freakish outlier not only in terms of “psychopathy” but also in size and strength to be able to afford expending energy to kill another member of their species for no good reason.
- PKop 2y ago> "So Kaufman and her colleagues started to record the showering on video over the course of a year, testing how Mary reacted to changes in the setup." Just leave her alone.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWhat was wrong with the title "Elephant learned to use a hose as a shower. Then her rival sought revenge"? Too similar to other submissions?
- lolinder 2y agoIt's long for HN and framed in a way that smacks of clickbait. I would have skipped right past that title, but this one works well. The submitted title is also part of the original title anyway. A lot of publications have a less clickbaity version as a subtitle that is meant to work equally well as a title, and it's pretty common on HN submissions to see people submit that other title because it usually represents the content better. That's pretty clearly what happened here.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoLess clickbaity, sure, but it doesn't say elephant. Title was changed after submission. Nobody had any problem with it when it was submitted 3 days ago.
- lolinder 2y agoNobody saw it when it was submitted 3 days ago, most likely because the title smelled of pop sci clickbait and didn't get up votes. At the time of writing that post has 7 votes and one comment—"This is just so cool". This one has 154 votes and many substantive comments. That's quite the difference. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42089532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42089532
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoI don't have a horse in this race but I could imagine a whole litany of reasons for one post doing better over another which have nothing to do with the title. Again, not trying to say one title is better than the other just that the argument given of "this post is doing better; therefore, the title is better" seems fallacious with so many potential confounding variables.
- ongytenes 2y agoI remember reading in Nature of a young bull elephant charging a safari vehicle, frightening everyone. Just before he reached them, he dropped to his front knees and dug his tusks into the ground. Then he made rumbling noises similar to laughter and walked off.
- tolerance 2y agoI've been waiting almost 4 hours to somehow bring up musth. That sounds like musth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth
- mock-possum 2y ago> Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal).[10] Wild.
- ziofill 2y agoI bet we are underestimating and misunderstanding animal intelligence by a lot. Animals are not lesser humans, they have other worlds.
- _yb2s 2y agoWe even think other humans are stupid if they have different values or goals that we don’t relate to. I think humans systematically underestimate animal intelligence because their goals are worldview are radically different.