Kids for Elephants!
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Born Free USA / What Elephants Like
August 2015

Welcome to Born Free USA's Kids for Elephants page! We're very excited to have you stop by for a visit. You already know a lot about elephants, but we wanted to give everyone a go-to source for the basic facts — and some fun facts, too!

 

There are three elephant species on our planet. Specifically:

African Elephants

Two species exist in Africa, the savannah and the forest. A male African elephant can measure 11 feet long, 13 feet high and weigh 6 tons — as much as five cars or 80 people!

Unfortunately, due to various human activities, the wild population of African elephants has fallen from 10 million in 1900, to 1.3 million in 1979, to about 500,000 today. Born Free USA works hard to reverse that trend and, by becoming more aware of the issues, you can help elephants, too!

Asian Elephants

Asian elephants are a bit smaller than their African relatives, but they are ideally suited for the forest environments they mainly inhabit. Asian elephants are mainly threatened by loss of this habitat, due to competition with people for land.

The Asian elephant has a long association with humans and is domesticated in certain countries. Sadly, elepehant calves often are taken from the wild to be trained to carry logs, kept in temples and used for elephant-back safaris.

Child's Circus Brochure

A few years back, when Julia Davis was 12, she co-wrote and even illustrated a brochure that alert young people to the cruelty elephants endure under the big top.

This brochure is "from a kid to a kid," containing facts about elephants in the wild vs. elephants in the circus, all told in kid-friendly terms. It also contains a few games!

Get your free copy today, and share it with your friends and family or buy several copies here! Download the PDF here!

 

Fun Facts about Elephants

• There are three species of elephant: African savannah, African forest and Asian.
• Elephants live in family groups that combine to form herds.
• Elephant family groups are matriarchal, which means that one of the older females is the leader.
• Elephants are very social. They like to hang out with other elephants and communicate in various ways, from loud trumpeting to low rumbling (so low that humans can't even hear it) that other elephants can hear over two miles away.
• Elephants use their trunks for a lot of different things, including reaching for food, blowing water onto their backs to cool off, and even as a snorkel for breathing while underwater.
• Elephants can live up to 70 years in the wild.
• Elephants belong in the wild, living free. Sadly, they are under constant threat of either being killed by poachers for their ivory tusks or being captured for zoos and circuses.
• They are herbivores, meaning they only eat plants like grass, fruit, bark and twigs.
• They use their tusks to dig and find water, clear pathways through the forest, shake fruit out of trees, and make scratches on tree trunks to mark their territory.

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