Here are 40 amazing Elephant facts.
1. Elephants can swim very well. They use their trunks as snorkels to swim underwater. Elephants in Africa have been known to swim 48 km. They have a six-hour swimming endurance and can rest without sinking.
2. Elephants have such keen senses of smell that they may occasionally locate water sources up to 12 miles away.
3. Elephants can have either a right or left trunk, just as people often have one or the other. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the dominant tusk of this species may be easily distinguished from the less prominent one because it will have more wear on it.
4. Elephants comfort one another by softly touching and patting each other on the trunk when they are distressed. Previously, this behaviour was only observed in humans, great apes, and raven-family birds.
5. With an 85% success rate in reducing conflicts between humans and elephants, beehive fences leverage elephants’ innate fear of bees to dissuade them.
6. Without any kind of training, elephants are among the rare creatures that can recognise human pointing.
7. Just like human newborns suck their thumbs for comfort, baby elephants also suck their trunks.
8. Elephants are aware of our ability to help them and can locate us even at great distances.
9. In keeping with the way elephants often grieve the loss of a member of their own family, some of the elephants that international conservationist Lawrence Anthony, dubbed the “Elephant Whisperer,” sought to save visited his family’s residence after his death.
10. Giving your old Christmas tree to the neighbourhood zoo is a traditional practice in Cologne, Germany. Elephants can consume up to three of these trees per day, and they can also be used as teeth cleaners.
11. Between 1994 and 2006, elephants in Assam, India, murdered about 605 people. Three elephants murdered sixty-six rhinos in South Africa. Researchers believe that poaching and habitat degradation have caused stress to the elephant species as a whole, as well as individual trauma for those who witnessed family members killed before their eyes.
12. In ancient combat, war pigs were used as a countermeasure against war elephants, which were scared of the pigs and would flee. War pigs were occasionally set ablaze to intensify this image.
13. Elephants that “dance” are psychologically sick and miserable due to their isolation and lack of opportunity for social interaction and independence.
14. The only other mammal with chins except humans is the elephant.
15. Despite their enormous size, elephants have five times lower cancer death rates than people because they have at least 40 copies of the TP53 gene, which eliminates cancer cells before they become a problem, as opposed to just two copies in humans.
16. Ben, a 30-year-old elephant, once went to Safari Lodge for assistance after being shot by poachers. Ben waited for the veterinarian to arrive and treat his three gunshot wounds for six hours near the lodge.
17. Elephants lack a scrotum; instead, their testicles are located just behind their kidneys, where a female elephant’s ovaries would be.
18. Some academics contend that it is morally immoral for humans to exterminate elephants because of their high level of intelligence and close-knit families.
19. Every day, an average of 96 elephants are murdered worldwide.
20. Rajputs would dress their horses with fictitious trunks before a battle, giving the impression that they were young elephants, which the enemy’s elephants would naturally avoid.
21. Only 10,000 years ago, an elephant-sized sloth was extinct. With a maximum height of 6 metres (20 feet) and a weight of 4 tonnes, it was among the biggest land mammals.
22. Elephants bury their dead, returning to the sites of burials many generations later. They have also been known to bury deceased people.
23. In the first season of Price Is Right, a competitor received a genuine elephant as a prank gift, although the winner would ultimately receive $4,000 instead. The winner objected and insisted on receiving the promised elephant. At last, the programme gave in and sent it to the Texas contestant’s house.
24. Elephants are able to identify the skulls of other elephants, in addition to their propensity for grieving for the dead. They use their feet and trunks to investigate the bones, looking closely at the heads and tusks of even long-dead elephants.
25. It has been suggested that the Greeks mistook the trunk cavity of dwarf elephant skulls for a single eye socket, which is how the story of the Cyclops originated.
26. A dog was sleeping in a hole where an elephant in India was assisting people in lifting logs, therefore the elephant declined to lower the log into that particular hole. The elephant would not lower the log into the hole until the dog had been driven away.
27. The oldest elephant in Japan passed away after living by itself for 60 years in a cage devoid of vegetation, trees, or other elephants.
28. According to the Book of Mormon, there is no proof that pre-Columbian America had any donkeys, cattle, horses, oxen, sheep, pigs, goats, elephants, wheat, barley, figs, silk, brass, steel, scimitars, or chariots. Before Columbus, none of these existed in America.
29. Marc Gross shoots paintballs containing capsaicin to elephants to scare them away from poachers using drones and Google Earth.
30. Under enemy fire, Union army general John Sedgwick famously asked his men, “Why are you dodging like this? At this distance, they couldn’t possibly strike an elephant.” He was quickly shot and killed.
31. “Defunct” On Borneo, pygmy elephants have been observed to reside.
32. A mother and her child were killed by an elephant in 2004. The elephant then buried their bodies and fled the scene.
33. The sound of the TIE fighter is a hybrid of an elephant cry and a car on damp concrete.
34. When an elephant comes into an area where bees are present, they only produce a certain noise. We refer to it as a “bee rumble.”
35. Because ivory poachers provide selective pressure against large-tusked male elephants, all elephants are evolving smaller tusks, allowing small-tusked males to have more offspring.
36. Mature male bull elephants do not become lone wanderers cut off from any community after being sent off to fend for themselves. Like human relationships, the male friendships that these associations develop can endure a lifetime or only shift with the seasons. They also travel and drink together.
37. Elephants are able to differentiate between several human languages and can tell which ones are spoken by those who have had previous interactions with them.
38. Following its opening, there was talk that the Brooklyn Bridge in New York was weak and would eventually collapse. On May 17, 1884, P.T. Barnum took 21 elephants across it to demonstrate its safety.
39. Compared to shrews, elephant shrews are more closely connected to elephants.
40. Just like human newborns suck their thumbs for comfort, baby elephants also suck their trunks.
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