Baby elephants weigh about 70 to 113 kg, about 90 cm tall and completely toothless. Only at the age of two they have small dairy tusks, which with age will be replaced by indigenous ones.
A newborn elephant needs more than 10 liters of mother’s milk per day. Up to two years it is the basic diet of the child, in addition, little by little the baby begins to eat plants.
They can also eat mother’s feces to make it easier to digest the branches and bark of plants. Elephants constantly keep close to their mother, who protects and teaches him. And you need to learn a lot: to drink water, move together with the herd and control the trunk.
Work with a trunk is a very difficult task, constant training, lifting objects, extracting food and water, greeting relatives and so on. The elephant’s mother and members of the entire herd guard the little ones from the attacks of hyena and lion.
The animals become independent at the age of six. At 18 years old females can give birth. At females there are children with periodicity about time in four years. Males become mature two years later. In the wild, life expectancy of animals is about 70 years, in captivity – 80 years. The oldest elephant, who died in 2003, lived 86 years.
