We are excited to celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day today and we hope you will celebrate with us! Join us on our Facebook page and share your favorite elephant themed photos, activities, or trivia.
Read below for some fun elephant trivia!
There really truly is a designated holiday-September 22-set aside solely for the appreciation of elephants. This website explains the history behind the holiday and shares links to games, crafts, and recipes (for elephant foot-print cookies, elephruit salad, and more).
The elephant’s trunk has about 15,000 muscles, and it takes baby elephants quite some time to learn to master its use. The trunk combines both nose and upper lip and transforms them into a single powerful organ that is able to touch, grasp and smell. It is strong enough to uproot a tree, sensitive enough to pick up a pea-sized fruit from the ground, and long enough to reach foliage high in the trees. The trunk is also used to drink by sucking up water and squirting it into the mouth. Finally, elephants use their trunks for greeting, caressing, threatening, and throwing dust over the body. ~source: african-elephant.org
Along with dolphins, apes, and humans, elephants are among the only animals known to recognize their reflections in a mirror. ~source: Scientific American online
Elephants are capable of vocal mimicry. A 10-year-old orphaned elephant in Kenya, who lives in semicaptivity about 3 km from a busy highway, has adapted her call so it sounds like the moving trucks she hears on the road. ~source: Scientific American online
Elephants are pregnant for nearly 2 years, the longest gestation of any land animal, and newborn elephant calves typically weigh 260 lbs. and stand just under 3 ft. at the shoulder. Two reasons we’re happy we’re not elephants. ~source: Wikipedia
Not all elephants have tusks, and it’s not necessarily a male-female thing. In Asian elephants, only males have tusks, but both male and female African elephants are tusked. However, due to the hunting pressure on tusked animals brought about by poaching for ivory, tusklessness is an increasingly common condition in African elephants. ~source: african-elephant.org
Elephants live in a structured social order. The females spend their entire lives in tightly knit family groups made up of mothers, daughters, sisters, and aunts. These groups are led by the eldest female, or matriarch. Adult males, on the other hand, live mostly solitary lives. ~source: Wikipedia
I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.
~Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Seuss Geisel,1904-1991)
Post on our Facebook page how you plan to celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day on September 22nd!
https://www.facebook.com/DrDayCareRI
Elephant Trivia is from Ella Publishing.