How the elephant masters its trunk 2: outreach

Apart from eating, trunks are good for a multitude of other things:

Scratching:

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Making friends

Elephant Orphanage. They are returned to the wild whenever possible.

Wrestling matches:

Male elephants jousting, for fun.

And when you are all grown up they are good for protecting and corralling your baby:

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The multipurpose trunk can also be used to make noise, loud noise! Here are three different types of trumpeting from the Elephant Voices website: https://www.elephantvoices.org/elephant-communication/acoustic-communication.html

But the best trick of all is to use the trunk as a snorkel, to breathe underwater. This video shows what I mean:

There is an astonishing underwater video out there of a snorkeling Asian elephant in deep water in the Andaman sea, but it is part of a tourist show, so I am not confident that the elephant is being properly treated, and I have chosen not to link to that video.

According to Rudyard Kipling, this wonderful trunk is all the crocodile’s fault…

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