BLIND TRUNK!
(plus other elephant facts)
★ DUMBOS in Botswana have threatened to send 10,000 elephants to London’s Hyde Park as MPs look to clamp down on sick trophy hunting, as we revealed yesterday.
Seeing the magnificent animals stomping around the greenery in the capital would be far more welcome than the litter left behind by gig goers and festive revellers during events put on at the park throughout the year.
★ Here KIM CARR
has some trunk-swingingly terrific elephant facts…
1 Born blind, elephants suck their trunk for comfort much like a human baby does with their thumb.
2 Their trunks are heavy but can pick up even a tiny single grain of rice easily – and, like us with our writing hand, they show a preference for the left or right-hand side.
3 Emotionally intelligent, elephants grieve their dead with a mum known to carry their baby with them for days even after it’s died if something goes wrong at birth.
4 Along with apes and dolphins, elephants also have selfawareness and can recognise themselves in a mirror.
5 There are three species of elephants. African Savanna (Bush), African Forest and Asian. African ones have round heads, larger ears and two “fingers” at the tip of their trunk while Asian ones have heads shaped like domes and one “finger” on their trunk tip.
6 Instead of sticking them on a jumbo jet, Botswana could set up a load of bee hives to help elephants from wandering where they don’t want them to like on farmers’ crops. They are afraid of the buzzing insects.
7 With the longest gestation period of any mammal, it takes 22 months for a baby elephant to fully develop in the womb and elephants can give birth into their 50s or 60s.
8 Japan drafted an elephant which was in its eighties into WW2. It was called Lin Wang.
9 Nearly 80% of an elephant’s day is spent eating with 16-18 hours chomping time. Tree bark is one of their favourites as it contains calcium and roughage, which helps digestion.
10 Dust and mud baths are an elephant’s way of cleaning and protecting their skin. The folds and wrinkles hold up to 10 times more water than their flat skin and help keep them cool in hot weather.
11
Feeling vibrations through their bones is how elephants communicate with each other and they use their trunks to say hello, like we would shake hands with someone.
12 The saying “elephants never forget” comes from the fact their area of the brain associated with memory – the temporal lobe – is larger and deeper than humans. They recognise and remember other elephants even if they haven’t seen them for yonks.
13 Listed as critically endangered (African Forest) and endangered (African Savanna and Asian) there are only 415,000 elephants left in the world.
14 Dumbo was Walt Disney’s personal favourite movie.
15 Author and artist David McKee based his Elmer the Patchwork Elephant book characters on his family – cousin Wilburn after a ventriloquist uncle and Aunt Zelda on his mum.