=============================================================| After printing or downloading this text document use browser BACK Button to return to page. =============================================================| univ missouri kansas city http://www.umkc.edu/imc/elephant.htm Elephants Enlarge upon your students' interest in elephants with a thematic unit. The Elephant When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a little tail behind, So LARGE a trunk before. -- Hilaire Belloc Background for the Teacher The largest living land animals are the elephants. Their great size and the thickness and toughness of their skins protect them from every other wild animal. Since they have no enemies to fear except man, elephants are usually peaceful and easygoing. They show great affection for one another and spend their lives as members of a family herd, which is made up of several generations of blood relatives, with occasional additions by mating from other herds. Family Life of the Herd: The typical elephant herd contains from 20-40 members of all ages. The males (bulls) and females (cows) are about equal in number. The leader is usually an old cow called a matriarch--she is more likely to keep an even temper than is a male. Although the males are generally peaceful, they sometimes go mad during their mating periods. When a bull goes musth, as it is called, he may trample down everything that crosses his path. If he causes too much disturbance, his relatives will drive him out of the herd. Usually he recovers and returns. Sometimes, however, he becomes a lone rogue elephant, a dangerous outcast that often attacks people or destroys villages. Except in cool, cloudy weather or when disturbed by hunters, elephants do not travel by daylight. During the hottest hours the members of a family herd huddle together in any shade they can find and sleep standing up. Toward sundown the herd walks to the nearest river, lake, or water hole to drink and bathe. They feed at night. When the herd moves, the pace is set so that even the very young and the very old can keep up. If a mother with a baby falls behind, her mate and several other members of the herd will remain to protect them. A male and female, once mated, will usually continue to travel together. Their attachment, naturalists believe, endures as long as they both live. As the herd straggles along, the elephants push down young trees with their shoulders and chests or uproot them with their tusks to feed on the tender roots, twigs, and leaves. In the open meadows they gather up tufts of grass with their trunks and stuff them into their mouths. At times a herd will invade the fields of natives to feed on bean plants, millet, banana trees, and other crops, but it will never enter villages or destroy huts. Only the solitary rogue elephants do this. Elephants have no permanent home. A herd may range over a 50-mile radius in the course of a single season. Seldom does it sleep in the same place for 2 days in succession. Bulls of different herds occasionally fight when they meet, but usually herds mingle on friendly terms. Often vast elephant armies composed of many family herds travel over the same route toward new feeding grounds. At birth the baby elephant is about 3 feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds. It has a sparse coat of woolly hair, which gradually disappears. It takes its mother's milk with its mouth and not, as some people imagine, with its trunk. The young elephant is nursed by its mother for about 2 years and remains under her protection for another 2 years. The period between mating and the birth of a young elephant is about 22 months. Thus female elephants as a rule bear young once every 4 or 5 years. The Trunk: The trunk, tusks, and feet are the elephant's most conspicuous features. The trunk is a prolongation of nose and upper lip combined. The 2 tubes of the nostrils, surrounded by muscle, run the whole length. The trunk is extraordinarily powerful and yet a delicate instrument--it can break a large branch from a tree or pick up a peanut. The upper side is tough and is often used for pushing, but the under side is very sensitive. The elephant guards his trunk carefully and never strikes down with it in fighting. The common idea that he uses his trunk in this way arose from the attitude he takes when he suspects danger. Because his eyesight is poor, he relies for warning on his keen senses of smell and hearing. Hence, when he is suspicious, he raises his ears to catch the slightest sound and thrusts his trunk outward to probe the air with noisy sniffs. But when charging or defending himself, he curls up his trunk out of harm's way. The elephant drinks by drawing water half-way up his trunk and then squirting it down his throat. He can also draw in corn and other grain and blow it into his mouth in the same way. The Useful Tusks: The lower jaw has no front teeth, and the upper jaw has only one pair. It is these 2 teeth, corresponding to incisors, that grow so long and form the tusks. They are second teeth that grow out after the baby elephant's tiny milk tusks are shed. The ivory of which they are composed is pure dentine, with a short cap of enamel at the tip which is soon worn away. The tusks keep on growing as long as an elephant lives. If they are used a great deal, they wear away at the points as they continue to grow at the roots. Because one tusk is likely to be used more than the other in digging up roots, they are seldom of equal length. The heaviest known single tusk weighs 235 pounds, the longest measures 11 feet, 5 inches, but these are unusual. A tusk weighing 100 pounds is well above the average for African ele-phants; the average for Asian elephants is much less. An elephant burdened with very heavy tusks may be forced to abandon the family herd because the weight prevents him from keeping up. Although there are 6 molar teeth on each side of the upper jaw and 6 on the lower jaw, never more than one or 2 are in use at the same time. As those in front are worn away, the successively larger molars behind come into place. Thus an old elephant may be left with only a single huge molar above and one below on each side. The Elephant's Padded Feet: An elephant's foot closely resembles the foot of man, except that the heelbone rests on a thick pad of flesh. The elephant's hind leg has no conspicuous heel or hock joint such as the hind leg of a horse or dog. The free joint is the knee, and the elephant is one of the few animals that can kneel on its hind legs. When the elephant walks he sets his hind feet down in the track left by his front feet. Picking his way with amazing silence through a forest, he needs to watch only where he puts his front feet. In deep mud or a bog his flanged feet spread out as they go in and contract as they come out, so they do not stick. Elephants seldom run as fast as 15 miles an hour, or about half the speed of a good running horse. An infuriated African elephant, however, has been known to charge 120 yards at a speed of 24.5 miles an hour. The running gait is the same as the walk, a shuffling stride. They cannot trot, gallop, or jump. A deep ditch only 7 feet wide stops them, for this is wider than their longest stride. They are, however, at home in deep water and can swim for 6 hours at a time. In the water, they sink almost out of sight, with the trunk held up high for air. Only the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and the tapir have hides as thick as the elephant's. They are called pachyderms, from a Greek word which means "thick-skinned." The hide on an elephant's shoulder may be an inch and half thick. All over his body it is loose and wrinkled. On the tail grow long coarse hairs larger than the lead in a pencil. Contrasts in African and Asian Species: On the forefoot the African elephant has 4 nails; the Asian elephant, 5. On the hind foot, the African has 3 nails; the Asian 4. The African elephant has 2 nipple-like "fingers" on the tip of its trunk; the Asian elephant has only one. The surface of the African elephant's trunk is divided crosswise into pronounced ridges and grooves; the trunk of the Asian elephant is smoother. The African elephant has much larger ears and holds its head higher than does the Asian elephant. Virtually all African males and most females have tusks; many Asian males and nearly all females are tuskless. Before white people began to settle in Africa, the African species ranged over the whole tropical region from sea level to the timberline of such snow-capped peaks as Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori. Today African elephants are plentiful only in protected game preserves throughout Africa. The range of the Asian elephants extends through the forested parts of Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, and the Malay peninsula to the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Pygmy Elephants and Albinos: The pygmy elephant is found in the Congo region and west-central Africa. Some biologists regard it as a separate species, others as a subspecies of the African elephant. It differs chiefly in its size and in the rounded shape of its ears. The pygmy elephant reaches a height of 7 feet and weighs more than a ton. The white elephants, occasionally found in Asia, are not a separate species but merely albino varieties of the common species. Elephant worship plays a part in several Oriental religions. The white elephant, however, is particularly honored in Thailand. For many years it was pictured on Thailand's national flag. Elephants and Humans: The use of elephants as beasts of burden in peace and war can be traced far back in history. The elephant corps attached to Hannibal's army is famous. The keddah, or corral, system of capture, has long been the chief method employed in India and neighboring countries where work elephants are most in demand. In this system, a long, V-shaped approach to a corral is built. Then workers with canes surround a wild herd and with loud shouting and much cane-prodding drive the elephants toward the approach and eventually into the corral. After capture, 2 tame elephants close in on a wild one and hold it until its feet can be hobbled with ropes. The next step is to get it used to the presence of a mahout, or driver. Feeding, friendliness, and firm discipline, plus the example of the tame elephants, soon complete the taming. The elephant is a striking exception to the rule that wild animals captured when full grown can rarely be domesticated. Most elephants that are used as beasts of burden, as well as those in zoos and circuses, were born in the wilderness and remained there until they were 10-12 years old. There are several reasons for this. This procedure is common because ele-phants do not breed readily in captivity, and the young are delicate and hard to raise. Further-more, a baby elephant matures very slowly, eating enormous quantities of food. Thus it is cheaper to let it mature somewhat in its native habitat and then to catch and tame it. Karl Hagenbeck, the famous German animal dealer, once trained 6 African elephants that had never been worked before to carry loads and their drivers in 2 days. Hagenbeck and many other experienced trainers say that there is no foundation for the belief that the African elephant is more savage and dangerous, or less easily trained, than the Asian elephant, in fact, many African elephants have been trained to work in the Congo River basin. In its work an elephant may be called upon to push heavy burdens with its head, to pull with a harness, or to drag logs with a cable that it holds in its teeth. If it has tusks, it may use them in various ways, but it never pulls loads with its trunk. In India elephants are sometimes used in tiger hunts. The hunter takes his place on a platform saddle, or howdah, strapped to the elephant's back. Beaters range through the jungle to drive out the tigers. When the great cats draw near, the elephant gives warning and so prepares the hunter for his shot. The chief danger to the hunter, it is said, is on the rare occasions when a wounded tiger leaps on an elephant's back and the elephant madly runs under overhanging tree branches to get rid of its attacker. In captivity as in the wilds, female elephants are the more steady and trustworthy. Males are seldom found in circus herds. An exception to this was Jumbo, the huge African male ele-phant made famous by P.T. Barnum. The word "jumbo" became a common adjective for any-thing extremely large. The elephant's usual willingness to obey commands and perform stunts has given it a reputation for great intelligence and a long memory. Animal trainers and zookeepers, however, question this reputation. Folklore and Fact: The ancient and fascinating relationship between humans and the elephant is referred to in various forms of mythology. In India the Hindu religion has an elephant-faced god named Ganesha, who is considered to be the remover of obstacles. He is also the patron of literature and learning. His name, traditionally, has been the first to be called out at the start of worship or at the beginning of a new enterprise. There is also a Hindu legend that says that the first elephants created had the power of flight, but they lost it when they landed on a banyan tree and fell through to crush the house of a hermit--the hermit's curse grounded them forever. Although it has been said that elephants live as long as 150 years, there is no actual record of any such age. 70 years is believed to be the maximum length of life in captivity. Stories have long been told of elephant graveyards to which all the elephants from the sur-rounding country go when they feel death approaching. Ivory hunters, however, have searched in vain for these graveyards. Perhaps the legend arose from the fact that Africans sometimes set fire to the grasslands to clear the ground for cultivation and thus may occa-sionally cause the death of a whole elephant herd by accident. It may also be that such graveyards are really places where groups of elephants drowned at one time, perhaps while crossing a river or trying to get through a bog. Elephants are not naturally afraid of mice, as legend claims--what they seem to fear is getting some small object or little animal lodged in their trunks. Elephant Hunting: Elephants are protected by law in most regions of the world where they are found today. However, between 1980 and 1990 poachers and other illegal hunters reduced Africa's elephant population from about 1.2 million to about 625,000 individuals. Sometimes as many as 300 elephants a day were slaughtered. Finally in late 1989, after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species placed the elephant on its most-endangered species list, a world-wide ban on the ivory trade was triggered. Over 75 nations support this ban and agree not to allow illegally obtained ivory to be imported into their countries. Origins: Elephants stem from a line of animals that developed in Eocene or Oligocene times, around 54 million years. The mammoths were close relatives of elephants, and the mastodons were more distant ones. The elephants' closest living relatives are the manatee, water-dwelling sea cows. Elephants belong to the order Proboscidea and to the family Elephantidae. The scientific name of the Asian elephant is Elephas maximus. The African elephant and the pygmy elephant both belong to the species Loxodonta africana. Elephant Trivia The elephant is the second tallest member of the animal kingdom--only the giraffe is taller. The elephant is the largest animal that lives on land. Among all the animals, only some kinds of whales are larger. Elephants are the only animals that have a nose in the form of a long trunk, which they use as a hand. A mother elephant calls to her young by slapping her ears against her head. The skin of an elephant is gray and wrinkled. It measures 1-1/2" but is surprisingly tender--flies, mosquitoes, and other insects can bite into it. An angry or frightened elephant can run at a speed of more than 25 miles an hour for a short distance. On a long journey, a herd of elephants travels at about 10 miles an hour. Elephants love water and bathe frequently in lakes and rivers. They are excellent swimmers. Elephants are color blind. In 331 B.C., a Macedonian army led by Alexander the Great defeated Persian soldiers who rode elephants in battle. In 218 B.C., Hannibal of Carthage used elephants when he crossed the alps from France and invaded Italy. In Siam (now Thailand) it was a national tradition to present the emperor with any white elephant that was captured because these rare elephants were sacred to the emperor. He was known as the "Lord of the White Elephant." It was commonly believed that if the emperor became dissatisfied with any of his nobles, he would order a white elephant sent to the courtier. The latter, unable to use or destroy the sacred animal, would be forced to bear the cost of maintaining the huge beast. In 1629, the emperor of Siam sent King Charles I of England an elephant--records do not say whether it was white--and the cost of its maintenance was a great drain on the royal treasury. Gradually, the phrase "white elephant" came to designate possessions that are expensive but useless. During the 1800's in London, an African elephant named Jumbo was featured at the zoo for over 24 years. In Swahili, "trunk" is mkono, or hand. September 22nd is Elephant Appreciation Day. The elephant became the symbol of the Republican Party on November 7, 1874, after political cartoonist Thomas Nast created a satirical drawing of an elephant representing the G.O.P. ("Grand Old Party") The elephant is also the mascot of the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide, a symbolism that has never been satisfactorily explained (too many versions). How Do You Say It? -- "Elephant" In Many Languages slon (Czech, Slovene) elefant (Esperanto, Hungarian, Swedish) elevant (Estonian) elefantti (Finnish) elephant (French) der Elefant (German) gajah (Indonesian) zou (Japanese) el elefante (Spanish) cawrfil (Welsh) An Elephant Word List African elephant / Asiatic elephant / bull / bush elephant / circus / cow / Dumbo / elephant graveyard / forest elephant / Ganesha / gray / Hannibal / herd / Indian elephant / ivory / Jumbo / keddah / mahout / mammoth / manatee / mastodon / matriarch / musth / pachyderm / Republican Party / rogue / trumpeting / trunk / tusk / wrinkled Quotes It is easier to understand after you spend time with these giants and realize that they not only need water but seem simply to enjoy it. I've seen them wade through channels to feed on swamp grass, and I've watched them linger in pools for needless hours, all for the love of a swim. --Frans Lanting, Okavango Poetry Eletelephony Once there was an elephant, Who tried to use the telephant-- No! no! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone-- (Dear me! I am not certain quite That even now I've got it right.) Howe'er it was, he got his trunk Entangled in the telephunk; The more he tried to get it free, The louder buzzed the telephee-- Of elephop and telephong!) --Laura E. Richards There are elephants in the jungle, There are elephants in the zoo. There's an elephant on the sofa, And I don't know what to do. Holding Hands Elephants walking Along the trails Are holding hands By holding tails. Trunks and tails Are handy things When elephants walk In circus rings. Elephants work And elephants play And elephants walk And feel so gay. And when they walk-- It never fails They're holding hands By holding tails. --Lenore M. Link Elephant Activities 1.Do the baby elephant walk: get down on your hands and knees, and walk like an elephant. Your arm and leg on one side go forward together. Then "step" with the arm and leg of the other side. You can't help but sway back and forth, just like an elephant! 2.A number of folk expressions involving elephants have been developed by people who live near elephants. What does each of these expressions mean to you? She is covered with an elephant's hide. He is a fool who cannot lift an ant but tries to lift an elephant. You're making an elephant out of a fly. If there were no elephants in the jungle, the buffalo would be a great animal. Now try writing your own proverb using the elephant to make your point. 3.Read the following poem to the children and have them act out the motions. Elephant Walk Right foot, left foot, see me go. (Step with 1 foot, then the other, swaying from side to side.) I am gray and big and slow. (Walk slowly around the room.) I come walking down the street With my trunk and four big feet. (Hold arms together in front and swing them like a trunk.) 4.For each child, cut a paper bag so that it will lay flat. Have the children crinkle their bags into balls and flatten them out. Provide gray tempera paint. Have them paint the bags. When the paint has dried, cut a large elephant shape out of each child's bag. Have the children glue on button or construction-paper eyes and add mouths with felt-tip markers. Resources on Elephants Appelt, Kathy. Elephants Aloft. Barry, David. The Rajah's Rice : A Mathematical Folktale From India. Burger, Carl. All About Elephants. Dana, Doris. The Elephant and His Secret = El Elefante y Su Secreto. Delacre, Lulu. Nathan's Fishing Trip. Dumbo. [motion picture] Ets, Marie Hall. Elephant in a Well. Freeman, Dan. Elephants : The Vanishing Giants. Johnson, Sylvia. Elephants Around the World. Kasza, Keiko. When the Elephant Walks. Kids Discover. March 1966. [entire issue on elephants] Kipling, Rudyard. The Elephant's Child. Mahy, Margaret. 17 Kings and 42 Elephants. McKee, David. Elmer. McNulty, Faith. The Elephant Who Couldn't Forget. Operation Dumbo Drop. [motion picture] Overbeck, Cynthia. Elephants. Ravielli, Anthony. Elephants, the Last of the Land Giants. Redmond, Ian. Elephant. Rettich, Margret. Suleiman the Elephant. Schlein, Miriam. What the Elephant Was : Strange Prehistoric Elephants. Seuss, Dr. Horton Hatches the Egg. Stewart, John. Elephant School. Tsuchiya, Yukio. Faithful Elephants : A True Story of Animals, People, and War. Thomas, Patricia. "Stand Back," Said the Elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!" Vipont, Elfrida. The Elephant and the Bad Baby. Yoshida, Toshi. Elephant Crossing. Young, Ed. Seven Blind Mice.