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Animal Tales: Elephants

By ALEX CUKAN, United Press International

Elephants are the largest of all land animals, have the largest brain of a land animal but perhaps most interesting are their social relationships.

"Members of the herd seem to react with understanding and empathy, when a member of the herd dies there is wailing and sadness and they look very upset," Judy L. Gagen, director of communications of the Indianapolis Zoo, told UPI's Animal Tales.

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"But long afterwards, they go back and pick up the bones of the dead elephant and there seems to be some understanding that the bones belong to the former member of the herd -- we see elephants help other and work very cooperatively."

Elephant herds are primarily female. A male calf can live with the herd but once it reaches adolescence, at age 12 to 15, he gets kicked out.

"It's a matriarchal society with females, sisters, aunts and children," Gagen said. "When it looks like a male elephant might be interested in mating, the females together push him out of the herd. Often it's difficult for the male to separate and he hangs out by the fringes of the herd."

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Occasionally an old bull will stay with the herd, but for the most part, bull elephants live on their own or in bachelor herds. Elephants can live to about age 60.

"Elephants are very tough on an environment. They eat mostly grasses, bark, small branches and fruit," Mike Keel, assistant director of the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Ore., told UPI. "In the wild they eat 400 pounds of vegetation a day, here in the zoo we feed them 100 pounds of dry hay a day."

If the environment, of the two-acre exhibit of Asian elephants at the Oregon Zoo were to contain trees and plants the elephants would eat it all, according to Keel. The exhibit has four female and two male elephants -- the male elephants are kept apart form the females because they can be more aggressive.

"The exhibit has a sand floor, a pool -- elephants love to swim -- a shower and walls that look like rock and in the wall we have plants where the elephants can't get to them, there are no trees," Keel said. "We also have a photo sensor in the shower that puts the shower on when the elephant stands in front of it, some like it and some are scared of it."

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In the wild, Gagen said, elephants can travel up to 30 miles a day on a regular basis. "They spend the day grazing, bathing and sleeping, but mostly eating."

Elephants help other species by clearing areas but since they move around so much the environmental impact was slight," Keel said. "The problem is that elephants don't room free anymore almost all elephants are now kept in preserves so too many elephants in too small a space can that can destroy an area."

According to Keel, there are problems in some areas because the elephant's habitat is getting smaller and the subsequent farmland with its crops is tempting to the elephant. "It can become violent if a farmer attempts to scare the elephant and the elephant gets scared and charges, tramples or hits the farmer with his trunk," he said.

The Asian elephant is endangered, there are about 4,800 of them left in the wild, and that has been stable over the last 10 years, but the African elephants went from 1.3 million in 1971 to about 300,000 to 400,000 today, Keel said.

"We've lost 1 million elephants in a relatively, short period of time," he continued. "Mostly it's a result of poaching -- for the ivory tusks that both male and females have -- and from the loss of habitat."

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Most zoos in the world have elephants and it's a problem for all of them to keep the elephants from becoming coach potatoes.

"They like to eat and if they don't get enough exercise they will gain weight," Gagen said. "We are exercising the elephants every chance we get, we walk them in the exhibit, we walk them on the service roads."

Elephants not only need a lot of exercise, they're very intelligent and they need mental stimulation as well.

"We have many enrichment programs, we hide food so the elephants have to look for it, reach for it," said Keel. "We have a painting enrichment program, we train the elephants to take a paint brush and paint abstracts, some like some don't, each has a different style -- some dab, some stroke and spray."

Eventually, the Oregon Zoo plans to sell the painting to raise funds.

Both the Oregon and Indianapolis zoos have been known for their successful elephant breeding programs.

Elephant reproduction is a lengthy process. A female elephant has a limited time in which she can conceive, it takes nine weeks to determine if she is pregnant and the entire pregnancy can last from 20 to 24 months.

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"The Oregon Zoo had the first elephant born in captivity in 1962 and since then we've had 27 births. We've found that putting a male and female together worked," Keel said. "We've had the only living twin birth, both twins were born but one died shortly afterwards."

Breeding African elephants has been more difficult. The Indianapolis Zoo has five female adults and two children, one, of which is male.

"It's very difficult to predict when a female can conceive, it takes some pretty invasive procedures to find out," Gagen said. "We found that a female elephant will have a double peak when the hormones are right for conception and it's the second peak in which she is fertile."

Because elephant reproduction must be timed precisely and because moving elephants around is not easy the Indianapolis Zoo has pioneered artificial insemination.

"In 1998, we had our first artificial insemination and since then we've has our first birth in 2000," Gagen said. "It was historic and a pretty big event."

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