African Elephants

AFRICAN ELEPHANTS

There are two kinds of elephants in the world today, the African elephant and the Asian elephant. The African elephant is larger than the Asian elephant. In fact, the African elephant is the world's largest land mammal. Elephants can live to be 70 years old. Due to loss of habitat and poaching, few elephants live to be this age.

In 1979, there were estimated to be 1.3 million elephants in Africa. By 1989, there were only 609,000 elephants left. At that rate, African elephants faced extintion within decades.

Elephants once roamed the entire continent of Africa. Today the elephants' range has been reduced to less than one fourth of the continent.

Elephants tend to travel in family groups made up of mostly related females. Adult males usually live in a separate herd. Adults reach eleven feet in height and weigh thousands of pounds. A large elephant may eat over three hundred pounds of food per day.

Believed to be highly intelligent, elephants can communicate over long distances with subsonic rumbles,inaudible to human hearing. They are often observed exhibiting quite playful behavior in watering holes and rivers. The young are carefully watched after by the herd.

Traditionally, elephants migrated long distances over the plains of Africa, following ancient elephant paths to find food and water. Today, many migration routes have been disturbed by a growing human population. Elephants in the 1990's are more and more limited to living only in the national parks.

There is intense competition between wildlife and a growing human population. In areas where people and elephants live close together, there are incidences of crop damage and sometimes people are killed by elephants.

Approximately five hundred million people live in Africa today. In 1979, there were estimated to be 1.2 million elephants in Africa. By 1989, the number of elephants had been diminished to approximately 600-700 thousand. An American tourist travelling in Africa is far more likely to have seen an elephant in Africa than the average African. This is because most elephants live in the national parks. Few Africans get to visit the national parks.

Since 1989, an international ban on ivory has helped to control poaching. Some people have talked about reopening the ivory trade. Everyone can help to stop poaching by refusing to buy ivory and protesting against it's sale.


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