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The elephant is the
largest animal to walk the earth.
There are two kinds
of elephants: the African elephant and the Indian elephant. The Indian
elephant is also called the Asian elephant. African elephants can be identified
by the larger ears. The elephant in the photo is an African elephant. Most
circus elephants are Indian elephants.
The African elephant
grows up to 10 feet tall and weighs as much as 12,000 pounds.
The Indian elephant
grows up to 9 feet tall as weighs up to 8000 pounds.
An elephants can carry
a load of 1200 lb.
Elephants eat 300 pounds
of food a day.
An elephant could win
a game of tug-of-war against 50 men.
Elephants can live
up to 70 years.
Elephants can be trained
to carry logs with their trunks, and have been used in the forestry industry
in Asia for many years.
Elephants can communicate
over a distance of several miles using infrasonic sounds inaudible to humans.
This was discovered only recently.
There is a growing
conflict between elephants and humans as more of the elephant's habitat
is developed. Elephants can destroy the crops of an entire village in a
single night.
There are about 600,000
elephants remaining in Africa.
The greatest threat
to elephants is the ivory trade. Most commercial ivory comes from elephant's
tusks.
From 1979 to 1989 was
a bad time for african elephants. About 70,000 wild elephants were killed
for ivory each year. In 1989 an international treaty limited the trade
in ivory, decreasing the number of elephants killed, but elephants are
still being killed for ivory.
Please don't ever buy
anything made from ivory! Don't even buy anything that looks like ivory!