Mona's love of elephants started when she was in 5th Grade - her favorite teacher ever, Ms. Ginsberg used to give them out.
Mona loved elephants because they are considered the smartest animals, They are super intelligent. And very emotional creatures. They were her favorite animal. She used to say they symbolized a lot, like strength for instance. Mona once told us that baby elephants suck their trunks similar to how baby humans suck their thumbs (she sent us a picture). We hope you'll enjoy this article, these images and videos (YouTube) of elephants (we do not owe the copyrights), from different sources on the web. 🐘💜🐘
The Sciense is in: Elephants are even smarter than we realized (Excerpts of articles by Ferris Jabr, Joyce Poole, Petter Granli, and National Geographic magazine) Researchers have found that elephants have hundreds of distinct signals and gestures. Elephant biologist and conservationist Joyce Poole and her husband, Petter Granli, founders of ElephantVoices, developed an online database of those signals, as described in an article on National Geographic's A Voice for Elephants blog. Among the categories of signals and gestures is "play."
"...People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully catalogued astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. Because of recent experiments designed with the elephant’s perspective in mind, scientists now have solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a sense of self..."
"...Scientists living among herds of wild elephants have long observed awe-inspiring cooperation between family members. Related elephant mothers and their children stay together throughout life in tight-knit clans, caring for one another’s children and forming protective circles around calves when threatened by lions or poachers. Elephant clan members talk to one another with a combination of gentle chirps, thunderous trumpets and low-frequency rumbles undetectable to humans, as well as nudges, kicks and visual signals such as a tilt of the head or flap of the ear.
