Fascinating Fun Facts About Elephants

Here are some amazing elephant facts and news that may be interested to you:

1. An elephant is one of the few four legged animals, which cannot run or jump.
2. At birth, the baby elephants are blind and they depend on their trunk and their mothers to help them.
3. Females can mate and have babies until they are around 50 years old, and they tend to give birth every 2.5 to 4 years.
4. Elephants feed around 16 hours a day and they consume around 300 to 600 pounds of vegetation every day.
5. Male elephants go through bouts of aggression, which last for short periods.  Hence, female elephants are kept at the zoos and used in the circus, as they are gentler in nature.
6. Elephants are social animals and they are often seen touching and caressing one another and playing around with the trunks.
7. An elephants tusk grows up to around 10 feet and weighs around 200 pounds.
8. Elephants cool themselves by fanning their ears. This cool down the blood in their ears, which completely cools them off.
9. Despite the size of elephant ears the quality of hearing is poor! The body at the back of an elephant ear is surprisingly soft, and called the knuckle, this area is used by trainers to steer and give commands to the elephant. The ears on an African elephant are flapped to help keep the animal cool
10. Elephants are herbivores, they eat varying types of vegetation including grass, leaves, fruits, and bark
11. Elephants have a walking speed of approximately 4 mph. A surprising fact is that they are able to swim for long distances!
12. Male elephants leave the herd when they around 14 years old to form their own male herd.
13. Adult elephants sleep while standing up while some baby elephants lie down to sleep.
14. The gestation period of an elephant is about 22 months, the longest for any land animal.
15. Elephants have warm greeting ceremonies to welcome back a fellow member of the herd if it has been away for a long time.
16. As elephants have a great sense of smell, they are able to recognize people by their smell even after many years, but their eyes are small and their eyesight is poor.
17. As a means of communication, elephants purr like cats. The frequency of their purrs and the sound they make is way below the human frequency and hence, isn’t audible to the human ear.

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