This 2017 video compares Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to African elephants.
At Amersfoort zoo in the Netherlands, after 22 months of pregnancy, Asian elephant Indra’s baby will be born soon, if all goes well.
There are webcams, making it possible to see the birth live.
UPDATE 1 November 2012: baby elephant born.
September 2012. With 2011 acknowledged as the worst year for elephants since the international ivory trade ban of 1989, it should come as no great surprise that there has been considerable interest and a raft of articles in the media featuring dead elephants in recent months: here.
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- It’s A Girl! Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation Announces Birth Of 24th Asian Elephant Calf (thehotspotorlando.com)
- Baby elephant delivered stillborn at Calgary Zoo (cbc.ca)
- “Eyes of Thailand” Raises Awareness of Elephant Endangerment (philanthropemag.wordpress.com)
- The Elephant in the Room. {Infographic} (elephantjournal.com)
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Elephants In India Are Getting Fat. No, Really.
By Maya Shwayder
September 17, 2012 2:59 PM EDT
Question: How do you put an elephant in the refrigerator?
Answer: Open the door, put the elephant in, close the door.
Joking aside, you may need a slightly larger-than-normal fridge if you’re looking to store an Indian elephant. India’s sacred temple elephants in the Tamil Nadu region in the south of India are more than 1,000 pounds overweight, due to lack of exercise and improper diet, the Telegraph reported.
“The female temple elephant, 15-year-old Parvathi, is overweight by 1,100 pounds, and efforts are on to reduce it,” Pon Jayaraman, executive officer of the Madurai Meenakshi Amman temple, told the BBC Tamil service.
The endangered species are often kept chained to the gates of Hindu temples, stunting any opportunity for exercise, and are fed a steady diet of rice and sweets by pilgrims who believe feeding them will bring blessings to them and their family and ward off evil, the Telegraph said.
An elephant’s natural diet is bamboo, grass and fruits. Their captive diets are also very much lacking in variety, the BBC said; in the wild, elephants eat mroe than 200 varieties of food and are not exposed to refined sugars.
Efforts are now underway to help the elephants slim down, although it’s unclear if anything will be done about the conditions in which the elephants live. The elephants are often kept confined in the temples, without space to roam freely, as they were meant, animal rights activists often point out.
On a more serious note, Asian elephants are an endangered species.
According to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology’s Animal Diversity Web, there are between 28,000 and 42,000 wild elephants remaining in Asia.
“Asian elephants have a long history of being hunted by people, originally for food, later for domestic stock and ivory,” the university stated.
“Poaching for ivory continues to devastate wild populations. They also suffer due to habitat loss caused by agriculture and deforestation. Centuries ago, they disappeared from southwestern Asia and most of China.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/385267/20120917/elephants-hindu-temple-hinduism-indian.htm
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