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Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's
Elephant Facts
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- African elephants are the world's largest land animals.
- As adults, they can weigh between 8,000 and 12,000 pounds each, eating as much as 350 pounds of food and drinking more than 18 gallons of water a day.
- Both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are used mainly for foraging, digging and peeling bark off trees.
- Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's first elephant arrived in 1907 after the Cleveland Press sponsored a "Pennies From Children" campaign to help the Zoo buy its first elephant. Minnie's arrival was celebrated on July 27, 1907, when 25,000 people came to see her.
- The Pachyderm Building at the Zoo opened in 1956 to house three elephants the Zoo obtained on an African safari the year before.
- The three female elephants now living at the Zoo moved here in 1997.
- The elephants receive daily baths, check-ups and pedicures from their keepers, as well as enrichment opportunities such as taking mud baths, following commands and playing with each other in their yard.
- As an occasional treat to the elephants and to keep their minds stimulated, keepers at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo allow the pachyderms to express themselves through the art of painting. Their work is auctioned off or sold to benefit elephant conservation initiatives.
- Elephants are highly intelligent animals that typically live in matriarch-led social groups and communicate with each other by sounds not always audible to humans.
- African elephants have been "red-listed" as endangered by the World Conservation Union because of illegal poaching, destruction of their natural habitat and the growing bushmeat industry.
- The worldwide population of African elephants in the last 20 years has plummeted from as high as 1.5 million to just 300,000. That's the equivalent of losing 100 elephants a day.
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