Sally, the boss of the herd, shares some interesting facts about ellies:
| I’ll become a full-grown adult when I’m about 25 years old. I’ll be about 2.8 m tall and I’ll weigh about 4000 kg. When the boys in my life are grown up, they’ll be about 3.5m tall and they’ll weigh about 6000 kg. |
| When I'm 13 years old I will be ready to start a family. I’ll carry my baby for 22 months, and, when it’s born it will weigh 100kg (we are naturally good mothers – so I can't wait!). |
| Our eyesight and hearing is not all that good but our sense of smell is outstanding. |
| For the first year or two of its life, my calf will suckle using its mouth (our trunks are complicated things and it takes some time to learn how to use them!). Unlike other animals, whose teats are found between the hind legs, mine are situated between my forelegs. |
| Our trunks are great fun (when we get used to them). They contain more than sixty thousand individual muscles, and we can do almost anything with them – like breathing, picking up food, breaking branches so that we can eat the bark, protecting ourselves and pushing trees over (which is something we love to do). |
| We don’t actually drink through our trunks. Rather, we suck the water into them and then blow it backwards into our mouths. |
| Our tusks (or ivory) are modified incisor teeth and are very useful tools for lifting, carrying and digging; they are also excellent weapons as they are really hard and strong. But for some reason they are really attractive to man, and this has caused most of the problems between that species and ours. We have been hunted and slaughtered for our ivory for thousands of years, and it was only recently that we received some protection when an international ban was placed on trade in elephant products. This has helped us enormously, and the poachers no longer pose as great a threat to our existence as they did in the past. |
| We grow new sets of ‘eating teeth’ - or molars – six times during our lives. These large and flattish teeth are situated way in the back of our mouths. Our last set appear when we are about 50 years old: when these become worn down we lose the ability to feed properly, and then we weaken and die. That’s our lot, I'm afraid. |
| Eating takes up about 18 hours of our day, and when fully grown we’ll require almost 200 litres of water and up to 180 kg of food per day. |
| We sleep standing up or lying down (- and Harry snores! Loudly!) |
| We use our large ears for cooling ourselves on hot days. They contain a massive network of veins and arteries. As we flap them, we cool the blood in these vessels which in turn cools our entire bodies down. You might say that our ears are our radiators. Clever, hey? |
| When we're close to each other, we communicate by means of low, rumbling sounds. But when we move away from each other, we use infra-sonic sounds that humans can’t hear, but which we can detect over distances of many kilometres. |
| Before our parents died, and like all wild elephants, we lived in family units (called herds) which consisted of our grannies, aunties, sisters and young brothers. Each herd is lead by a wise old granny or mother-figure called a matriarch. That’s what I am now to all the other ellies here at the Park. |
| Young bulls leave their family herds when they are between the ages of 13 and 18, and go off to form bachelor herds, only returning when they are in musth and want to mate with the sexually mature cows who are in oestrus. |
