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The Indian elephant and Wild elephants can be trained to do heavy work and are often put to valuable use in timber mills.
The African elephant is more difficult to tame. It is the largest land-living animal in the world. A fully grown African elephant may be more than eleven feet high at the shoulder and may weigh seven tons.
Elephant
Elephant Today, there live two species (kinds) of elephants - the African and the Indian, or Asian. But, from fossils, biologists know of some 350 extinct species. Some of these lived at the same time as prehistoric man, but others roamed the Earth up to 60 million years ago.
The earliest elephants were no bigger than pigs, and looked little like their present-day descendants. From these developed such creatures as the shovel-tusker, with its big, shovel-like lower jaw, the mastodon, and the hairy mammoth.
The later elephants all had long trunks and big tusks (curving teeth) characteristics of the two living elephants. An elephant's trunk is perhaps the most remarkable of all animal organs. It is the long, drawn-out nose and upper lip, which the elephant uses as an extra limb particularly to gather food. Its tip is so sensitive that it can pick up a single peanut. Yet the trunk's muscles are strong enough to pick up massive logs. The elephant can use its trunk to suck up as much as 12 pints of water, which is then squirted into its mouth or onto its back.
The tusks are enormously overgrown upper front teeth. They are valuable for their ivory, and may weigh up to 250 pounds. Elephants are huge. An African male may reach a height of 12 feet and a weight of seven tons or more and it is the biggest of all living land animals. The Indian species is smaller, but both have thick, pillar-like legs. They can run quite fast, but cannot jump. Elephants are vegetarians, and may eat as much as 500 pounds of grass and leaves in a day, plus 50 gallons of water.
Apart from being smaller than African elephants, Indian elephants have smaller ears, and their trunks differ at the tip. Both can be tamed and used to pull and carry great loads, but tame elephants are much more common in Asia than Africa. In India, a mahout, who rides the elephant, grows up with his elephant. Both man and elephant have similar lifespan and working lives.
