That is pretty good hearing no matter what time it is – nice to have big ears…

The elephant in baseball: The mascot for the Oakland Athletics (“A’s”) baseball team is based on the figurative white elephant. The story of picking the mascot began when New York Giants’ manager John McGraw told reporters that Philadelphia manufacturer Benjamin Shibe, who owned the controlling interest in the new team, had a “white elephant on his hands”; Connie Mack defiantly adopted the white elephant as the team mascot, although over the years the elephant has appeared in several different colours (currently forest green). The A’s are sometimes, but infrequently, referred to as the ‘Elephants’ or ‘White Elephants’. The team mascot is nicknamed Stomper.

Asian elephants are an endangered species and only 40,000 them are in existence.

For the most part it is true that these elephants don’t have any real predators. The risk is generally for the younger ones that are too weak to keep up with the herd or they tend to wonder off. With so many females trying to protect them though they can often keep the young ones alive until they are large enough that predators won’t bother to consider them to be something to consume. Human poachers are the elephant’s true enemies.

Elephants and trees: A bull elephant will push down about 1000 trees every year. Not always for food, sometimes just as a show of strength. I’ve seen elephants in the wild pushing down trees with a diameter of about 1 meter! That’s pretty impressive. Pushing down a tree doesn’t give us a right to call him destructive though. In doing this, he will provide food for smaller browsers that could not reach the leaves before the elephant pushed it down. He will provide food and homes for hundreds of years for insects, spiders, snakes, birds etc. The tree, rotting, will push nutrients into the soil and enrich that area. These fallen trees will halt erosion and promote natural growth in the area. These are all good things!