Elephant Interaction

9/3/2018

Every day this man hangs out with these three African elephants. Rambo is the male, 30 yr old, at birth weighing in at 1/2 ton. Rachel is the female, 31 yr old with their baby Jabulani is 8 yr old. They have been in this park for 20 years. Rogan the elephant had to be put down because he kept getting into the neighbors property and pushed a safari buggy filled with people into a pond of hippos and crocodiles. This was not good. Not sure why they couldn't relocate him on the 1,000's of acers here. At 11:00 each day they automatically head up to this encounter area to be examined by the humans.

Rambo let us check out his nose holes in his mouth, his heart, teeth, BIG tongue, look at the veins behind his ears and feed him. Elephants have about 100,000 muscles in their trunk. He has a difficult time picking up food by the end of his trunk because of a previous injury to one of the finger type lips on the end of it. So we put food in his bent trunk; which he then threw into his mouth. We also took handfuls of food and put it on his tongue. Blahhhh.....Bob's coat was all slimy because his sleeves were down. VERY INTERESTING!

Eeeeew ...Slimy mouth, but no bad breath.

Rachel and Jabulani turned their trunk up so we could fill it with feed and then they would put it into their mouth. Finally they gave them a 5 gallon pail of water that took about 2 seconds to drink.

The elephants skin is like feeling a tree trunk with wire hairs sticking out of it.

This was a fun event.