Elephant Facts

Elephant Facts

1. The African elephant is the largest land mammal on Earth and perhaps one of the most intelligent.

2. The trunk of the African elephant has two finger like structures at its tip that allow the animal to perform both delicate and powerful movements.

3. African elephants have ears that can be five feet long and are shaped like the continent of Africa.  Elephants can flap their ears. The big ears help keep the elephants cool.

4. Elephants eat all day long.  They eat vegetables, such as grass, leaves, and other plants.  They also eat fruit, like bananas.  Elephants use their trunks to grab food and put it in their mouth.

5. Elephants sometimes drink up to forty gallons of water a day.

6. Elephants use their trunks to pick up things and to hold things.  They can pick up something as small as a marble, or as big as a tree. They also breathe through their trunks.

7. Elephants have two tusks, which are made of ivory.  The tusks grow to the right and the left sides of their trunks.

8. People used to hunt elephants so that they could get their tusks.  Ivory was used to make beautiful jewelry and statues.  It is against the law to hunt elephants now, because hunting them made them endangered animals.

9. Its remarkable tusks first appear when the animal is two years of age and continue to grow throughout life. Elephants use tusks for peeling bark off trees, digging for roots, herding young, “drilling” for water and sometimes as a weapon. 

10. Males reach a length of 18 to 21 feet and weigh up to 13,200 pounds. Females are about two feet shorter and weigh half as much.

11. Elephants can live 50 to 60 years. 

12. Elephants are capable of surviving in nearly any habitat that has adequate quantities of food and water.

13. Elephants spend about 16 hours a day eating. Their diet is varied and includes grass, leaves, twigs, bark and fruit.

14. Elephants form deep family bonds and live in tight social units. A family is led by an older matriarch and typically includes three or four of her offspring and their young.

15. While males do live primarily solitary lives, they will occasionally form loose associations with other males. These groups are called bachelor herds.

16. Only the most dominant males will be permitted to breed with cycling females. The less dominant ones must wait their turn. It is usually the older bulls, forty to fifty years old, that do most of the breeding.

17. Females carry their young for almost two years. At birth, the calf weighs about 250 pounds. A cow may give birth every three to four years.

18. All members of the tightly knit female group participate in the care and protection of the young. Since everyone in the herd is related, there is never a shortage of baby sitters.

19. Habitat loss and the ivory trade are the greatest threats to the elephants’ future.

20. Elephants in captivity lead miserable lives. In stark contrast to their natural tendency to roam several miles each day, they are bound in shackles and chains and forced to perform tasks that are the antithesis of their innate instincts.

21. Most animals in zoos were either captured from the wild or bred in captivity for the purpose of public display, not species protection.