Exotic Elephants

It means that they are capable of the internal generation of heat. How?  Well they use their big ears.  By flapping their ears they can regulate their body temperature.  This works because their ears have lots of veins and when they flap their ears this cools them down and once the blood in their ears is cool it circulates through the body cooling the body as it goes.

When they are first born they weigh 250 to 320 pounds, but an adult male can reach as much as 15,000 pounds! That is BIG! They call a baby elephant a calf. When first born it takes practice to use their trunk, in fact, sometimes they trip over their trunk at first. It can take as long as 6 to 8 months to really control their trunks for eating and drinking. When they drink with their trunk it is not used like a straw, but they suck the water up into the trunk then release it into their mouth and swallow the water. Some grown elephant bulls can actually reach higher in the trees with their trunks than giraffes.

African elephants eat grass, trees and hay and approximately 20 pounds of fruit and vegetables daily. They only digest half of what they eat, the remaining makes great fertilizer.

Man likes to kill elephants for the ivory in their tusks. The word elephant is Greek for ivory. We have a name for these hunters called poachers. Poachers can get as much as $6,000 for a tusk, so they have a lot of motivation to kill elephants for their tusks. For population control game reserves were developed for protection. Because man has used the land for farming the elephants have lost a great deal of habitat. The trees they eat have been cut down and cities have sprung up. Conservation is defined as the care and monitoring of animals and animal populations for their continued existence.

According to a recent e-mail I received from the Wildlife Conservation Society: “WCS scientists have confirmed that Gabon’s Minkebe Park, once home to Africa’s largest forest elephant population, has lost a staggering 11,100 elephants due to ivory poaching since 2004.” Therefore, addressing wildlife trafficking is of the utmost importance.

A herd is a group of animals that live and travel together. The females and calves stay in the herd but the males leave the herd at around 10 to 15 years of age when they are teenagers. The female leader of the herd is called a matriarch. The elephant’s gestation period is 22 months, pretty long!

The female African elephant is ready to mate at about 9 years old, but the male does not begin mating until 11 to 12 years of age. They usually deliver their first calf around age 16. Elephants in the wild live 60 to 70 years and in zoos they often live longer than that.

The Clinton's Have Joined in the Efforts to Reduce Elephant Poaching They are working together to stop the killing; stop the trafficking; and stop the demand for elephant parts.