Elephants are such beautiful creatures. Their monstrous size makes sure that they stay relatively safe in the wild despite not being on the top of the food chain. That being said, they are also extremely gentle creatures that leave in a herd and deeply care about their own.
1. Elephants prefer one tusk over the other, just as humans are mostly either left or right-handed.
2. Elephants are highly sensitive animals. If a baby elephant complains, the entire family will rumble and fuss over it. They express grief, compassion, self-awareness, altruism and play.
3. They sometimes “hug” by wrapping their trunks together in displays of greeting and affection.
4. Elephants have the longest pregnancy of all the animals. It takes a female 22 months from conception to give birth.
5. They purr like cats, as a means of communication.
6. They use their feet to listen, they can pick up sub-sonic rumblings made by other elephants, through vibrations in the ground.
7. The elephant trunk has more than 40,000 muscles in it.
8. Elephants can live to be over 70 years old.
9. Asian elephants have one more toenail on each foot than African elephants.
10. Elephants have a slow pulse rate of 27 beats per minute. It’s 80 per minute for us humans. For a canary, it is 1000!
11. They are the only mammals that cannot jump.
12. Elephants have incredibly poor digestion, with only 50% efficiency. They release an incredible amount of methane gas and produce around 250 pounds of manure a day!
13. Elephant skin is over an inch thick.
14. When an Elephant walks past a place where a loved one once died, it will stop in its tracks. This silent pause often lasts several minutes.
15. In the early 1900s, African Elephant populations were estimated to be in the millions, while there were around 1,00,000 Asian Elephants.
16. Today, due to incessant poaching there are around 700,000 African Elephants in the wild and just 32,000 Asian Elephants.
17. On average, elephants spend about 16 hours of each day eating everything from grasses, small plants, and bushes to fruit, twigs, tree bark, and roots.
18. In addition to eating massive amounts of food, adult Elephants drink 30-50 gallons of water every day.
19. Elephant herds are matriarchal, with older females taking turns taking care of the calves and protecting them while travelling from place to place.
20. Poaching of elephants for ivory has been steadily increasing, with 800,000 African elephants killed over the last three decades.
So, yeah. Let’s just come together as people and save these majestic animals.
