Who doesn’t think to have an Elephant as a pet, Elephants are smart enough to be trained like dogs, and can be house trained, walked on a lead and even taught basic tricks. The trend of keeping Elephants as pets, however, has led to an influx of pet Elephants to rescue, as their well-meaning owners struggle to meet the animal’s complex needs.
About Elephant
When you have thought about having an elephant pet you have to know about this mammal, Elephants are the largest land mammals on earth and have distinctly massive bodies, large ears, and long trunks. They use their trunks to pick up objects, trumpet warnings, greet other elephants, or suck up water for drinking or bathing, among other uses. Both male and female African elephants grow tusks and each individual can either be left- or right-tusked, and the one they use more is usually smaller because of wear and tear. Elephant tusks serve many purposes. These extended teeth can be used to protect the elephant’s trunk, lift and move objects, gather food, and strip bark from trees. They can also be used for defence. During times of drought, elephants even use their tusks to dig holes to find water underground.
Do Elephant Make a Good Pet?
They are very large animals that are not used to being kept as pets and have welfare needs that would be impossible to meet in pet shops or people’s homes. “Elephants can also be dangerous and it would not be safe for people to be able to keep them in their backyard.
Elephant and Human
The fact that Elephants are habituated to humans does not mean they are even semi-domesticated. Like with big cats and other wildlife, the process of domestication involves the selection of specific characteristics in an animal and breeding with those individuals that display those characteristics. This may take many generations and even involves genetic changes over time.
This is why captive elephants need to go through this cruel and painful process of breaking their will to accept human control, and this is why they often develop behavioural problems. They are WILDLIFE – NOT ENTERTAINERS.
Can I own an Elephant as a pet?
Can you own an Elephant in USA
Every state has Exotic or Wild pet laws specifying if a species is allowed, banned, or requires a special permit. In some states, you can have a pet squirrel or kangaroo or elephant pet, while other states have even banned pet rabbits. Some states are more lenient than others. Find out what your state’s exotic pet laws are, and before you bring a pet home to your house or apartment, double-check with your local government to make sure the rules haven’t changed or the local, city, and county laws do not ban having an elephant as a pet.
Can you own an Elephant in UK
The government ruled out the possibility of allowing elephants to be kept as pets. The announcement came following a petition to 10 Downing Street calling for UK pet shops to be allowed to sell elephants to the public.
More than 650 signatories supported the petition, which argued that children could get a better understanding of the giant creatures if they were kept as pets. But the government dismissed the suggestion by the 12-year-old petitioner, Jack Smithies, claiming “it would not be safe for people” to keep elephants.
The bizarre petition stated: “We the undersigned petition the prime minister to allow the sale of elephants in pet shops in the UK. We believe that every child in the UK would benefit from owning an elephant.
“We would like to make it legal to import African/Indian elephants to sell in pet shops across the UK. Elephants are creatures that children could learn about better by owning their own and keeping them in easily and cheaply converted sheds.“
Smithies succeeded in obtaining 655 supporters. There have been rumours that he received the backing of TV natural history presenter Sir David Attenborough.
Smithies wrote: “It was my dream as a child to care for these magnificent creatures but, at the age of 12, I find that nobody takes me seriously. Please take my idea into account.”
The government was keen to give proper attention to the proposal. In response to the petition, it wrote: “The government agrees that keeping a pet has many benefits, not just for children but people of all ages. “However, the government does not think elephants would make good pets. They are very large animals that are not used to being kept as pets and have welfare needs that would be impossible to meet in pet shops or people’s homes.
Requirements for Elephant as a pet
Taking care of an elephant as a pet is a huge responsibility, demanding considerable resources and commitment. Unlike horses, which have been domesticated over thousands of years, elephants are wild animals and can be unpredictable and potentially dangerous. elephants also have dietary requirements unlike that of the regular horses or cows. You must also be trained in handling your elephant since improper handling can cause your elephant to turn on you.
Contact your state’s wildlife agency to learn the state requirements for elephant ownership, then contact your local government concerning licensing requirements and zoning laws. Owning an elephant pet also requires you to have a U.S.D.A. license from the federal government, issued by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
Build an enclosure for your elephant that is a least 1000 to 5,000 square feet. The enclosure should also have a shelter and proper drainage. Build an outer fence around it as a buffer zone to prevent anyone from approaching the inner fence.
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How Much Does it cost to buy Elephant as a Pet ?
Many people are entranced with the idea of having such a beautiful and powerful animal as an elephant as a pet. It is a shocking fact that there is actually few “pet” Elephant in the USA that can cost around $50,000 to $100.000 to keep an elephant as a pet.
elephants are surprisingly expensive to purchase as a pet. People in the USA can purchase a captive calf from some places, the Dangerous Wild Animal Act has made lions, tigers, bears, elephants, alligators, monkeys, and servals illegal to own, requiring a perm in some states.
Elephant Diet
Having an Elephant pet will make you spend a lot of money on food, Elephants are herbivores: they eat a range of plants, including grasses, fruit, and roots. An adult elephant consumes about 100 kg (220 pounds) of food and 100 litres (26 gallons) of water per day. These amounts can be double for a hungry and thirsty individual. Such consumption makes elephants an important ecological factor because it substantially affects and even alters the ecosystems elephants live in.
How Much would it Cost to Raise an Elephant?
It is quite a lot of money. Assuming you mean to raise from a calf? If you have a calf and mother elephant, the baby will drink milk for between 2 – 6 years, elephant calves consume nearly 20 pints of milk a day. Drinking that much milk results in gaining nearly 30 pounds a week. , but at a few months old begin to eat vegetation.
Adult elephants consume between 200 – 600 lbs (between 90 – 270 kilos) of vegetation per day. Be that hay, grass, a mix of forage and feed. The cost of hay and feed varies wildly depending on location, time of year and supply and demand. To compare a similar, but not the same, large animal. A horse will eat between $100 – 250 worth of hay and feed per month. An average horse weighs approximately 1,100 lbs depending on the type of horse, large adult or a small pony. An elephant weighs between 5000 and 14,000 lbs. Five to fourteen times the size of an average horse.
Elephants must spend about 16 – 18 hours a day eating. They have poor digestive systems and so must consume very large amounts of vegetation each day, most of which is a fibre that is passed through the digestive tract and ends up being poo’d out.
Suffice it to say that it would be a very expensive endeavour and there is a reason that most kings and emperors were the ones who could afford to raise and feed elephants in captivity?
We have not yet mentioned Vet care and foot care, training, transport and shelter for an elephant. I think it’s getting quite expensive already.
Are Elephants Aggressive?
No elephants are not aggressive animals, Elephants are usually peaceful animals. Females may, however, be aggressive when young calves are present and bulls can be exceptionally aggressive during musth. All elephants may become aggressive when sick, injured or harassed. Elephants react to threats or challenges in three different ways.
Can Elephants be Trained?
Yes, Elephant can be trained, A conceptually similar experiment involved pre-training four logging Asian elephants to remove food from a cover-less bucket by inserting their trunk into the bucket, Next, a treat was placed at the bottom of a bucket and, at the same time, the bucket was covered with a lid. The elephants were then trained to obtain the treat by removing the lid. Once this behavioural sequence was established, a treat was placed inside the bucket and, at the same time, the lid was placed on the ground alongside the bucket, so that the lid no longer obstructed access to the food.
As in the Thorndike case, if the elephants understand the nature of the task, they should ignore the lid on the ground and retrieve the reward directly, as they used to do in pre-training sessions before the lid was introduced. But if they fail to understand the causal link between lid removal and food retrieval, they might continue to remove the lid before retrieving the food. The observations supported Thorndike’s mechanical learning hypothesis.
Can you Domesticate Elephants?
Elephants are not and have never been domesticated like cats or dogs. These animals have gone through the process of ‘domestication’ – a socio-biological process that happens over the course of many generations of human-guided, While they tried to pet elephants or train them.
Most experts agree that to be domesticated, animals must have been selectively bred by humans for at least 12 generations, with offspring from each generation chosen for further breeding based on their desired traits – like strength, size, appearance and behaviour.
The instincts and even anatomy of domesticated animals are significantly different from their wild counterparts. They likely still display natural behaviours, but due to selective breeding, they are much easier to handle than wild animals of the same species.
It’s not possible for one individual wild animal to become domesticated within their lifetime.
5 Facts About Elephant
1. THEY CAN IDENTIFY LANGUAGES.
Researchers at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK have discovered that African elephants can distinguish differences in human gender, age, and ethnicity purely by the sound of someone’s voice. If the voice belongs to a person who is more likely to pose a threat, the elephants switch into defensive mode.
2. THEY CAN USE TOOLS.
Elephants have been known to use sticks to scratch themselves in areas they couldn’t otherwise reach, and fashion fly swatters out of branches or grass. Others have been observed digging a hole to reach drinking water, and then plugging the hole with a ball formed from chewed bark to prevent the water from evaporating, thus saving it for later use.
3. THEY UNDERSTAND HUMAN BODY LANGUAGE.
Researchers recently observed evidence that elephants might understand human pointing. They tested this by pointing at food hidden in one of two identical containers and observing which container a group of captive African elephants approached. Without any previous training, the elephants picked the correct container almost 68 per cent of the time.
4. THEY SHOW EMPATHY.
When u pet Elephant you will see a lot of things and the most are Empathy, A recent study observed Asian elephants comforting one another when distressed. The elephants in the study used both physical contact and vocal sounds as forms of comfort, stroking one another with their trunks and emitting small chirps. The study concluded this behaviour is “best classified with similar consolation responses by apes, possibly based on convergent evolution of empathic capacities.”
5. THEY MOURN THEIR DEAD.
It would be a stretch to say elephants, or any other animals, understand death in the same way humans do. But elephants have demonstrated fascinating reactions to the deaths of their kind, often displaying what appears to humans as symptoms of grief and mourning. They caress the bones of the dead with their trunks and will stand near the body of the deceased for hours. Sometimes they even try to bury the remains. They don’t behave this way toward the remains of other animals. In this powerful photo, taken by John Chaney for National Geographic, a female elephant “very slowly and with much empathy wrapped her trunk around the deceased elephant’s tusk. She stayed in this position for several hours…”
6. THEY MIMIC HUMAN VOICES.
An Asian elephant named Koshik baffled researchers in 2012 when they realized he could say five words in Korean. “If you consider the huge size of the elephant and the long vocal tract and other anatomic differences—for example, he has a trunk instead of lips… and a huge larynx—and he is really matching the voice pitch of his trainers, this is really remarkable,” said Dr Angela Stoeger, a lead author of a study about Koshik that appeared in Current Biology. While it is almost certain Koshik doesn’t comprehend the meaning of the words, the researchers believe he began mimicking sound as a way to bond with humans, which were his only form of social contact during his formative years.
7. THEY HAVE EXTRAORDINARY MEMORIES.
You knew this one, but let’s point to some specific examples. Elephants can remember routes to watering holes over incredibly long stretches of time and space. This is necessary for elephants that live in the desert where water is scarce. Research also shows that elephants often form close bonds with companions, and can recognize them even after long periods of separation. Dr. Shermin de Silva, now director of the Uda Walawe Elephant Research Project in Sri Lanka, said in 2011 that “Elephants are able to track one another over large distances by calling to each other and using their sense of smell … Our work shows that they are able to recognize their friends and renew these bonds even after being apart for a long time.” In 1999, two elephants named Shirley and Jenny, once companions in a circus, reunited at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee after more than 20 years apart. Their immediate bonding can be seen in the video above, shot during their reunion.
8. Elephant and Cat
Behaviour Is One of the Main Differences Between Elephants and Cats. Elephants are usually peaceful animals and are so friendly with pets like cats or dogs. A cat, on the other hand, sleeps away much of the daylight hours, preferring to jump into turbo time right before you jump into bed. and for sure you cant keep pet elephants inside the house just in ur backyard which must be so big to handle this cute mammal.
source:
https://baanchangelephantpark.com/elephant_post_17
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/jan/10/politics
