A Celebration of Elephants

Every September 22nd, we celebrate Elephant Appreciation Day! To show our appreciation, here's a look at some of the amazing things elephants do.

1. Play Soccer and Darts

(Image credit: Reuters/Sukree Sukplang)

An annual festival in Surin Province, Thailand celebrates elephants and all that they do. Highlights of the event include a soccer match, battles recreations, and an elephant dart competition!

2. Wash Cars



Elephants at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon will wash your car for just $20, but be warned that the guarantee states they will not get it clean! However, the elephants have fun spraying water everywhere, and the money goes to support the zoo. See a video of the elephants in action.

3. Play Harmonica


(YouTube link)

This baby elephant at Phuket Island in Thailand enchants tourists with her dancing skills and harmonica music! She's not the only harmonica-playing pachyderm. An elephant named Five at West Midlands Safari Park in England plays the harmonica every chance she gets, and an African elephant named Bubbles plays harmonica at Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina.



4. Facilitate Romance

An Asian elephant named Marcella lent a hand, or rather, a trunk when Oliver Thompson proposed to Emma Morgan at the Blackpool Zoo in England. Elephants are Morgan's favorite animal, so Thompson made arrangements with the zoo staff for the couple to go inside the elephant enclosure as a special treat for her birthday. Morgan was thrilled with the opportunity, but she was ecstatic when Marcella approached her and handed her a ribbon -with an engagement ring attached! The ring was an inexpensive trinket from the gift shop, just in case the elephant wouldn't part with it, but Thompson was ready with the real one. Oh, she said yes to the proposal.

5. Covert Theft




Just this year, and elephant was found to be the cause of the mysteriously disappearing hot tub water at the Etali Safari Lodge in South Africa. The tub was drained for days before a guest caught an elephant drinking it! The lodger snapped a photograph, which enabled staff to identify the elephant as one they knew named Troublesome. The solution to the problem was as easy as providing Troublesome with her own drinking water.

6. Talk

An elephant in Yongin, Korea named Kosik made worldwide headlines a few years ago when zookeepers announce the 16-year-old elephant had learned to talk! Kosik was not deliberatley trained to speak, but keepers heard recognizable words coming from his enclosure. The elephant was heard uttering the words "yes," "no," "lie down," "sit down," (in Korean) and some other phrases his handler had used. It is doubtful that Kosik understands the meaning of the words, but reproducing the sounds in itself is quite an accomplishment. See a Korean news report on Kosik. Another pachyderm who was reported to speak was Batyr, an elephant at the Karaganda Zoo in Kazakhstan, who was said to have had a vocabulary of about 20 Russian words. Batyr spent his entire life at the zoo without the companionship of any other elephant. He died in 1993 of an accidental drug overdose.

7. Get Hitched




This elephant wedding was staged by the Cole Brothers Circus on September 23rd, 1936. Little did they know that the date just before would someday be designated as Elephant Appreciation Day! See more pictures of the elephant wedding at SideShow World.

8. Play Basketball

(Image credit: Flickr user Alex Twose)

Elephants at the Island Safari Centre on Koh Samui, Thailand are taught to play basketball! The activity is purportedly to stimulate the elephants and keep them healthy, but it doesn't hurt that elephant basketball games are a big hit with tourists. It takes only two or three months to train an elephant in ball-handling skills. The stars of the basketball program are nine-year-old Toktok and six-year-old Malie. No matter how good the elephants are at the slam-dunk, it is still up to their handlers to keep score.

9. Water Ski


(YouTube link)

If you visited Ponce DeLeon Springs Park in Florida in 1959 or 1960, you might have seen Queenie, the water-skiing elephant! Liz Dane adopted Queenie in 1953 and they grew up together. Read more about Queenie in this interview with Dane.

10. Paint




A group of elephants at the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Thailand have learned to paint. The amazing thing is that these are not abstract paintings, as most animals produce, but representative images! Sure, they are trained to do it, but whether they memorize a sequence of lines or paint what they see, it's an amazing accomplishment. The elephant pictured is named Hong; you can see some of her works on her personal page. See video clips of Paya, Sela, Lucky, Boon Rod, Ging Gaow, and Lakshmi painting pictures at the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project. You can also see an extended video of the entire process in this post. Sales of elephant paintings support the elephant refuge.


Something you can do on Elephant Appreciation Day is to send a donation to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a wonderful 2,700-acre sanctuary for retired performing elephants. Elephants should not be forced to perform for humans, and their wandering nature requires vast amounts of open space, not the tiny "habitats" to which they are subjected at most zoos.

The Elephant Sanctuary currently houses fifteen elephants and is always willing to accept more, allowing them to live freely on large expanses of land and determine their own lifestyles. The Sanctuary can always use monetary help to keep their charges well fed and comfortable -- it costs $125,000 per elephant to maintain this facility for a year. Go to elephants.com to learn how you can help!
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My wife and I were on our honeymoon in Thailand last year and say the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Thailand where the elephants can seemingly paint.

It truly is an amazing feat, but my wife discovered their secret. The trainer is standing next to them with a hand on a tusk. The elephant holds the brush and the trainer guides each stroke, as if the brush were an extension of the trainer's hand, through the tusk and trunk.
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I really wish people could see this for what it really is, animal abuse, plain and simple. These elephants are intelligent creatures and people ruin their minds and bodies for their fun, utterly disgusting.
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OR, we could learn to appreciate elephants for what they are, rather than for what they can do to entertain us. Elephants are highly intelligent, sensitive, interesting animals who - when left alone by humans - stay together in extended families of females (and young males) for life, caring for one another in a multitude of ways. Yet none of your examples features anything about real elephants (except possibly the one wild elephant in the list, who tellingly bears the name Troublesome, apparently because he is likely to challenge human dominance). The elephants you choose to list, except for that one, have been stolen from the wild and trained to perform tricks for human entertainment - and they have been trained, it is vital to note, through pain and punishment via tools like the hook you see in the first photo. This Elephant Appreciation Day, let's try appreciating elephants AS elephants, rather than reducing them to miserable objects of entertainment.
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Not to harsh the buzz but there's another side to the elephant issue. Their abuse.
http://www.ringlingbeatsanimals.com/

My daughter and graphic designer won an award for a poster she created for PETA on this topic:
http://amygrace.com/blog/2010/08/elephants-never-forget/
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Neatorama,

Would you PLEASE stop posting stories about animals being used/abused by humans as cute or quirky? It's highly irresponsible, and it's seriously turning me off your website.

Also, high five to all you other posters who saw this story for what it is. Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.
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Neatorama: Have you folks been living in a cave for that last several years and have not heard that so called "trained" elephants have been "trained" by abusive methods ???? get a clue. Elephants are very intelligent, but it is sad/sick to use them as circus performers/slaves.
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I have to agree with Petra, I'm always so saddened by the abused animal stories you post. Mostly because you don't see them as abused animal stories, you see them as cute and funny.
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Great list - animals always seem to have so much interest for us "humans". The soccer playing elephants are cool - would love to see some video of them playing darts. I assume that they shoot the darts out of their trunk, bushman style?

Another cool article about elephants I found here:
http://listsoplenty.com/blog/archives/10165

Cheers.
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