![]() ![]() Maharani turned her enormous body around and dragged the pipe along with her, closer to the gate. As she was prying off the lid, Spike’s trunk waved through the bars, as though he were beckoning Maharani to come closer. She used another strategy, rolling her pipe around until she found an opening at one end. Next came 29-year-old Maharani, a spring in her step, ears flapping. The test was designed to incorporate things elephants do in the wild-like stripping bark-but be novel enough to test their interest in new objects. Spike, left, and Maharani find different ways to get apples out of a pipe. Then a keeper lured Spike outdoors and the gate clanked shut. He punched through the paper, pulling out the treat. As Spike held the strange object upright between his tusks, he groped with his trunk until he found a hole covered with paper in the pipe’s center. Apples had been stuffed inside three different compartments, and the task was to get to them. He headed straight for a 150-pound PVC pipe in the middle of the dusty floor, wrapping his trunk around it and easily lifting it from the ground. ![]() Spike, a 38-year-old bull, ambled in from the yard. An elephant's trunk has close to 40,000 muscles, and as it’s reaching out to smell you, it can knock you down flat. As the gate from the outdoor elephant yard lifted, a keeper admonished everyone to stand farther back, even though there were bars separating us from the animals. The building was still closed to visitors, but about a dozen zoo staffers were lined up to watch. On a recent winter morning at Smithsonian's National Zoo, I watched two Asian elephants take a test. ![]()
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