Elephants.

Hello friends! After this one week, March Break hiatus, I am back and hopefully in full force. My blogging has been sorely lacking lately and I hope to hop back into it. To start again, I am going to write a blog about elephants. That's right, you read correctly! I am sitting in the airport with my sister, on a lay-over and we got bored. We eventually hit the topic of how elephants are better than humans.

I found this shot a while back. I just think it is absolutely beautiful.
There is something peaceful and serene about it.
Photo by Maaike van Oorschot

Here is a list of the characteristics we came up with that make elephants so amazing:

- They are caring animals. Elephants live in herds and they all help to care for each other. There are even stories of elephants that take in another elephant's child or even stray baby animals from other species. They all have each others' backs and work together like one big happy family.

- "An elephant never forgets anything!" I have heard that so many times. I am not 100% sure that it is true but I have heard many times about elephants' amazing memory. I wish I had an amazing memory because I am constantly forgetting little things.

- Elephants are honest about their emotions; if another elephant dies, they actually drink rotting fruit to get drunk and forget about their emotions. Isn't that so sad? Apparently they quite enjoy drinking, even when they are not sad.

- My sister also pointed out that elephants are incredibly environmentally friendly. When they do drink wine (e.g. rotting fruit), they don't bottle it, helping to decrease the amount of waste in today's world.

- Elephants are not self-conscious about the hair on their bodies; all animals are born with hair. They realize this. You don't see them shaving their whole bodies every other day!

Sometimes I feel that this is what I look/feel like...
Photo by Andrew Perry

- Elephants maximize their body use by giving body parts multiple purposes. Okay, so mostly it's their nose. They use their nose/trunk for so many different things and our just sits on our face, breaking and getting stuffy. Not so great.

See? Elephants are pretty cool critters. My sister and I hope to create a list like this for animals once a month. If you have any other cool facts or stories about elephants, please share! Hope you all had a fantastic week!

These orphan baby elephants wear rain coats to ward off pneumonia.
Photo by Michael Nichols

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P.S. We were scared to forget our ideas so we wrote an awesome list on the back of a boarding pass while eating our lunch! We're definitely super nerds. And don't have the memory of an elephant...