Today is World Elephant Day. It's a day to celebrate and raise awareness of these majestic, huge mammals.
To mark this day I thought today I would share 10 fun facts about Elephants that you might not know:
1. There are two types of Elephants- the African Elephant and Asian Elephant
2. Elephants are the biggest and largest land mammals
3. Both female and male African elephants have tusks but only the male Asian elephants have tusks. They use their tusks for digging and finding food.
4. Female elephants are called cows. They start to have calves when they are about 12 years old and they are pregnant for 22 months.
5. An elephant can use its tusks to dig for ground water. An adult elephant needs to drink around 210 litres of water a day.
6. Elephants have no natural predators. However, lions will sometimes prey on young or weak elephants in the wild. The main risk to elephants is from humans through poaching and changes to their habitat.
7. The elephant’s trunk is able to sense the size, shape and temperature of an object. An elephant uses its trunk to lift food and suck up water then pour it into its mouth.
8. An elephant’s trunk can grow to be about 2 metres long and can weigh up to 140 kg. Some scientists believe that an elephant’s trunk is made up of 100,000 muscles, but no bones.
9.Female elephants spend their entire lives living in large groups called herds. Male elephant leave their herds at about 13 years old and live fairly solitary lives from this point.
10. Elephants can swim – they use their trunk to breathe like a snorkel in deep water.
Just to reiterate fact number 6, Elephants are at risk of extinction. They are hunted and killed for their tusks which some cultures believe have medicine inside them. This is strictly not true, elephant tusks are simply made up of Keratin, the same stuff that our hair and nails are made from. Keratin has no medicinal property at all!! In other words, these elephants are dying for no purpose whatsoever!
Humans are the biggest threat to these animals. We can change that. Share a photo of an elephant and let others know the struggles they are facing. Every 15 minutes, 8 elephants are poached. We can stop that. Make others aware and/or donate to the WWF/ an Elephant charity and help save them.
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