Recently in Elephants Category

Those four magic words should be enough to push readership of this blog past seven!

Really, who can resist baby elephants, especially when they're being cute and appearing in videos?

The 5-month-old elephant is named Samudra.

The "little guy" now weighs in at around 770 pounds, nearly 500 pounds more than his birth weight, and he has become less clumsy, keepers say.

"It appears he's developed some athletic ability," Lee said. "He loves playing with a blue ball, knocking it around with his trunk soccer-style."

 

Elephants never forget. Exactly WHAT they're so busy remembering, nobody knows.

But it turns out that the lumbering pachyderms are good at math too.

This is partuclarly embarassing to me because reporters are notoriously bad at numbers.

Under carefully controlled experimental conditions -- essentially comprising a large cage and two buckets of assorted fruit -- one elephant at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo managed to get its sums right 87 per cent of the time. A slightly less gifted pachyderm across the country in Kyoto scored a still respectable 69 per cent.