At an African sanctuary called Elephant Havens, it’s time for the babies to get their bottles. Every three hours.
BIG Bottle Babies!
18 thoughts on “BIG Bottle Babies!”
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At an African sanctuary called Elephant Havens, it’s time for the babies to get their bottles. Every three hours.
Comments are closed.
Where do I sign up?!
The teeny tusks!
Perfect video for a Friday end of day. 🙂 How sweet that they run to get their bottles.
They don’t just run–they run TRUNKS UP and MOUTHS OPEN. I would give anything for that experience.
The trunks curled up on top of their heads is so cute!
I’m right behind Duckie in line to volunteer. Heck I’d even pay to be an elephant keeper for a day and feed the babies, and walk them, and give them skritches. Love them all come running up to get their bottle. It’s like someone rang a giant dinner bell.
That would be an EXCELLENT idea! I volunteer!🙋🏼♀️
Charge people to participate and make money for the elephants care!
Those are BIG babies!
Good thing they don’t need burping.
Too bad “Baby Elephant Walk” is probably still under copyright–that’d be the perfect music. (Who else is old enough to remember “Hatari”? Or Henry Mancini, for that matter?) Nothing that big should still need to be on milk. Certainly not 8 times a day! They have mini-tusks, do they not have some molars to grind up leaves? And brilliant, Duckie, yes, good thing they don’t need to be burped.
According to SeaWorld’s page on elephants (why does SeaWorld have a page on elephants?) they aren’t fully weaned for over two years!
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“Calves nurse for the first six months of life. Elephant milk is high in fat and protein (100 times more than the protein contained in cow’s milk).
On average, calves drink about 10 L (21 pt.) a day.
Calves begin to experiment with their developing trunks between four and six months of age by picking grasses and leaves to supplement their diet. Weaning from milk gradually follows this process. Calves are not completely weaned until they are over two years of age and may weigh between 850-900 kg (1,874-1,984 lb.).”
Thanks for the research. I dunno why SeaWorld has elephant facts either. I find myself questioning “100 times more than the protein contained in cow’s milk.” The way that’s worded–“high in fat and protein”–sounds like a claim of how “rich” the milk is for the same volume. Cow’s milk has 8 grams of protein per 240 ml serving (roughly 240 grams–not exact, but for this calculation it’s close enough). That means by the plain meaning of that claim, elephant milk would have 800 grams of protein in 240 grams of milk, and that’s not how numbers work. If a nursing elephant gets 100 times the protein a nursing cow does, it’d have to be at least partly because of the helping size. Elephant milk CAN’T be that much richer.
My sister and I watched Hatari (and another called Daktari) when we were young and it was on after school. I remember Henry Mancini cos we used to watch the Pink Panther cartoon on Saturday morning, and my mom would tell us about him.
Remember, elephant babies are huge (3 feet at birth) and will nurse from 2-4 years! They are getting used to eating other things after 6 mos, but still nurse. Tusks appear around 2-3 years.
To be clear, “Daktari” (Swahili for doctor, per the Wikipedia article) was a TV series (Marshall Thompson, Cheryl Miller) with 89 episodes over 4 seasons. “Hatari” (Swahili for danger, again per Wikipedia) is a theatrical movie (John Wayne, Red Buttons, among others). They probably were both on afternoon TV, but there’d have been a lot of one-hour episodes of Daktari and only the one Hatari movie. In Hatari, a female photographer undertakes the upbringing of (eventually) three orphaned baby elephants, and Baby Elephant Walk was the music written for a scene where she leads them to a watering hole. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yl0cjXDNO0 There’s the scene for anyone willing to endure the ads.
I ran out of edit time, but I wanted to add to my last post that this was decades before YouTube or Instagram (or cute animal sites), and not just everyone had seen a baby elephant video. That scene was a revelation to many of us as to how cute they are and how they love to play in water, blow bubbles with their trunks, etc.
“Baby Elephant Walk” was my first thought, too—even though I haven’t ever seen Hatari! Henry Mancini wrote a lot of very catchy music over the years.
FWIW, I pay for YouTube Premium and so I never see the ads as long as I’m logged in. We all have to budget according to our means, of course. I decided the expense was worth it for me. I follow a lot of YouTubers, and I use YouTube for research and for presenting resources to folks I work with.
That probably would be money well spent. The ads get worse all the time (which is capitalism, I suppose–keep increasing ads till the audience leaves, which I haven’t yet, though I sure do think about it).
Heffalump pregnancies last around 22 months, so it’s not surprising that the babies nurse for at least that long.