It may be time to rethink the abuse “ use up like a pig bed . ” research worker have witness that Sus scrofa are n’t entire slob at dinner party and will take the time to wash out their nutrient before chowing down .
This is the first time that solid food washing has been documented in copper , and its discovery was a glad accident . Shortly after three new wild boars get in at Switzerland ’s Basel Zoo in 2013 , local pressure come to see the raw resident and their display , which had a flaxen ground and a creek run through the eye . During the press sojourn , keepers fling apple composition to the pigs so they ’d be active for the guests . Amid the excitement , the zookeepers noticed something odd : When the pieces of apple got gumption cling to them , the boar carried them over to the creek and crowd them around in the piddle with their snouts before eating .
After hear about this , anthropologists Volker Sommer and Adrianna Lowe get in at the menagerie to follow up on the keepers ’ observation with an experiment . For several days , they denied the boars their dawning repast and then give them some sandy apple and some uninfected apples in the good afternoon .
All of the adult boar take at least some of the dirty apples to the creek , the researchers say , " where they set them down in shallow flow water or puddles and press them to and fro with their rostrum . ” After a spry rinse , the orchard apple tree were sand - free and the boars set out eating . In some face , they ate a few apple piece powerful away before washing other ones . The clean apples were never washed before being eat .
That the boars selectively rinsed the sandlike orchard apple tree and not clean ace propose that they ’re really lave them , the investigator say in theirreportof the field of study , and not merely moistening them to make them easy to swallow or exchange their grain . As for why the pigs right away ate some dirty apple without wash them , the researchers retrieve that the Sus scrofa might have had difficulty seeing the Baroness Dudevant and sometimes require to taste it before deciding to wash the apples . Since they skipped breakfast , they might have also been too athirst to bother with laundry first .
During the experiment , one of the boars seems to have come up with an alternating Malus pumila - washing technique . After a few days , he break carry the food to the brook and rather prick the dirty apples into pieces and dropped them on the ground . Then , the scientists say , he “ give rise considerable amount of money of saliva , which he dropped repeatedly and in a targeted fashion over the Malus pumila halves , before eat on the so - cleaned yield pieces . ”
Next , the investigator want to attempt to figure out if other Sus scrofa dampen their food or if the behavior is unique to this radical at the zoological garden . They also want to roll in the hay whether the behavior is congenital , fancy out through trial and error by each creature or learned from other boars . steward at the other zoological garden where the boars had come from said they ’d never seen the animals wash their food , and they only started doing it at Basel Zoo . One of the pigs , though , was known for eat while standing in the water at his former home . He may have learned the benefit of rinse his nutrient there and was imitate by his new roommate when he arrived at Basel .
