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Historically, elephants were used in the logging industry, as well as in agriculture and occasionally warfare. Asian elephants in captivityĪlmost a third of Asian elephants live in captivity, largely in Thailand, India, and Myanmar. At birth, elephants weigh about 200 pounds and stand about three feet tall. Cows usually give birth to one calf every two to four years. Elephants have a longer pregnancy than any other mammal-almost 22 months. In the wild, female elephants, called cows, live in close-knit family herds with their young, but adult males, known as bulls, tend to roam on their own. They demonstrate a wide variety of behaviors associated with high intelligence, including compassion, mimicry, grief, altruism, use of tools, and self-awareness. They have a highly evolved neocortex, similar to humans, great apes, and some dolphin species. IntelligenceĮlephants are widely viewed as one of Earth’s most intelligent animals. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day.Įlephants are crepuscular-they typically sleep during the day and are most active at dawn and dusk. (African elephants have two.) DietĮlephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark-and they eat a lot of them. Asian elephants have a fingerlike feature on the end of their trunk that they can use to grab small items.
The trunk alone contains about 100,000 different muscles. Elephants are fond of water and enjoy showering by sucking water into their trunks and spraying it over their bodies. It’s used for smelling, breathing, trumpeting, drinking, and grabbing things-especially a potential meal. Elephant trunksĪn elephant's trunk is actually a long nose with many functions. In 2012 the Thai government began cracking down on smuggling. Young wild elephants are also trafficked from Myanmar into Thailand for the tourism trade. However, a growing trade in elephant skin, used for jewelry, threatens both males and females alike. Only males have tusks, and females have been largely spared. Asian elephants, nonetheless, do still face the threat of poaching for the ivory trade. Most illegal ivory today comes from African elephants, with some 30,000 poached each year.
Threats to wild Asian elephant populations include habitat loss from deforestation and agricultural development, as well as conflict with humans as elephants seek space and raid crops grown close to their forest habitats. Its population has declined by an estimated 50 percent over the past 75 years, and there are an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Asian elephants left in the wild. The Asian elephant is classified as Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). About a third of Asian elephants live in captivity. They live in forested regions of India and throughout Southeast Asia, including Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. (An African elephant's ears resemble the continent of Africa.). Asian elephants can be identified by their smaller, rounded ears. The elephant is Earth's largest land animal, although the Asian elephant is slightly smaller than its African cousin.