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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.
- Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's three female African elephants -- Moshi, Jo and Martika -- are staying at the Columbus Zoo during construction of the new African Elephant Crossing exhibit.
- 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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