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All tagged elephants
On April 11, a magnitude 5.2 earthquake shook Southern California for a few minutes. No big deal, by California standards, but during the tremors the elephants at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance were caught on camera displaying their survival plan, namely by forming a protective circle around their young.
Last week a 34-year-old Asian elephant named Shanti concluded her 21-month pregnancy and 19-hours of labor with a 314-pound bundle of joy: a baby girl. In announcing the birth the Houston Zoo said the baby elephant, named Kirby, is “a trunk-load to be thankful for.”
A brutal drought in southern Africa threatens food supplies across at least six countries. Among them, Namibia and Zimbabwe have recently announced plans to cull hundreds of wild animals, including nearly 300 elephants, as they struggle to feed their populations.
This week the Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of five elephants in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. The question at hand: Shall the pachyderms have the same rights as “persons” under the law?
Flash floods in northern Thailand forced more than 100 elephants to evacuate to higher ground, while at least two animals were swept away presumed lost. Dramatic videos and photos released by Elephant Nature Park near Chiang Mai showed panic-stricken elephants wading through flood waters as their human handlers struggled to lead them to safety.
“Is that a pink elephant bathing in the mighty Olifants river?” Theo Potgieter, a guide and safari operator in Kruger National Park, South Africa, recently asked on Facebook. Rhetorical question. Potgieter had heard reports of a pink elephant living in the national park but hadn't seen the rare creature himself, until now. “A handful of sightings have been reported of this young bull in late 2023,” the guide tells media outlet SWNS, “but to my knowledge, there is no footage."
Mundi is a 41-year-old African savannah elephant who spent 35 years alone in a small enclosure at Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez Zoo. The troubled zoo was closed for good this year, and Mundi was relocated to the comparatively luxurious Elephant Refuge North America in Georgia.
Nzou was only two years old when her family was slaughtered by ivory poachers in Zimbabwe. Rescuers tried to reintroduce Nzou to other elephants, but she never fit in. “Her need for a family never faded,” intones Natalie Portman, narrating National Geographic’s new series, Secrets of the Elephants, “So she took matters into her own hands …”
How do you keep elephants and humans apart? In Africa it’s an urgent problem, as human populations grow and encroach on elephants’ wild habitat. Now conservationists are trying out a novel form of deterrence: “technologically generated bee sounds.”
