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A group of Sri Lankan military and wildlife officials staged the daring rescue of two drowning wild elephants this week off of that nation’s eastern coast.

New York State Police said Monday a wayward pachyderm was found wandering by state troopers in the town of Westtown, about 70 miles northwest of New York City. ..." The lost elephant needed to be escorted back home after wandering away from an animal sanctuary. Photos posted by the law enforcement agency show the elephant milling around in the dark on the road, which was illuminated by the headlights of a car. While it's not clear how the elephant got out of the sanctuary, National Geographic notes that the animals are not docile in darkness. "These hungry animals do not...

Tim Saenger said he was “still in shock” Monday, days after a surveillance video showed the burning and destruction of the large elephant statue that had stood for decades outside his home in unincorporated Leyden Township. Saenger said his father brought the statue from Wisconsin to Northlake in 1986. It remains unclear why anyone would target the elephant, Saenger said. “We don’t have enemies or beef with people,” he said. “Most like me and my family.” Saenger said that people at times would associate the elephant with the Republican Party, and he hoped it wasn’t a politically motivated attack. Saenger...

Elephant Genome Project: evolutionary theory re-written by Joel Tay Published: 31 May 2018 (GMT+10) The results of a decade-long Elephant Genome Project have caused previously accepted evolutionary tree models to be discarded. It was previously thought there were two living species of elephants: the African, and the Asian. However, this research suggests that there are actually three: the Asian elephant, the forest-inhabiting African elephant, and the savanna-roaming African elephant.

The Trump administration will allow Americans to bring tusks and other elephant body parts back to this country as trophies, in a pivot away from the support President Trump voiced last year for an Obama-era trophy ban. The decision, announced quietly in a March 1 memorandum from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, withdrew previous rulings on trophy hunting and said the agency would allow sport hunters to receive permits for the trophy items on a “case-by-case basis.” The move contrasts sharply with the position taken by Trump in November. After the Fish and Wildlife Service announced a repeal of...

In the 1970s, Kenya had about six times as many elephants as Zimbabwe, and today Zimbabwe has three times more elephants than Kenya (see chart).  What happened that caused the dramatic reversal in elephant populations in the two African countries?  Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) explain in their excellent article "Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community": "Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in...

Chaminda Walakuluge said the navy mounted the 12-hour rescue after spotting the elephant struggling to stay afloat around eight kilometres (five miles) off the island's northeast coast. Divers aided by wildlife officials approached the distressed animal and tied ropes to it before towing it gently to shallow waters near the coast, where it was released late on Tuesday. Walakuluge said the animal had likely got swept into the sea while crossing the Kokkilai lagoon, a large stretch of water that lies between two areas of jungle. "They usually wade through shallow waters or even swim across to take a short...

A new and lethal strain of synthetic heroin resulted in five overdose deaths in Minnesota this year, and officials believe another five undetermined deaths will also be linked to the drug. The five cases are the first confirmed in-state deaths caused by carfentanil, a drug from China that is 100 times more potent than the already dangerous fentanyl. Carfentanil is federally approved to immobilize large animals such as elephants for surgery, and two salt-sized specks of the opioid can cause instant death, a local emergency room doctor said Thursday. ... Investigators are working locally and nationally to find the source...

One of Kenya's last great tusker elephants was reportedly shot and killed by poachers. During a routine flyover on January 4 by the conservation group Tsavo Trust in southern Kenya, the body of a famous, roughly 50-year-old African elephant known as Satao II was discovered, though news of his death was only announced Monday. While the cause of death has not been confirmed, conservationists believe he was killed by a poisoned arrow while feeding in the eastern region of the park. The area is known as a "poaching hot spot." African elephants are traditionally referred to as "tuskers" when their...

This baby elephant did not take naturally to the water when she went for a dip in a Thai swimming pool. The calf took a tentative splash in a pool at a veterinary clinic on Thursday as part of a lengthy rehabilitation process to heal her injured foot. Baby Fah Jam was three months old when her front left leg was caught in a trap set by villagers in Chanthaburi province, 155 miles southeast of the capital, Bangkok. Veterinarian Padet Siridumrong said Fah Jam, who is now fiv

SOUTH LUANGWA NATIONAL PARK, Zambia, - An elephant in Zambia demonstrated his ability to keep a cool head under pressure when he escaped being made into a meal by 14 female lions. The video, filmed by Jesse Nash on a tour with Normal Carr Safaris at the Chinzombo Safari Camp in Zambia, shows a group of 14 lionesses descending on a young elephant. Advertisement The elephant, keeping calm, swats at the lionesses with his trunk while making his way to a nearby body of water. The pachyderm reaches the water, but only a handful of the predators decide to stay...

He was given little chance of survival. But, the little elephant has rallied thanks to round-the-clock care from staff at South Africa's Thula Thula Rhino Orphanage, and the friendship of a dog called Duma. Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2016/01/15/baby-elephant-rejected-by-herd-finds-new-family-and-a-dog-5625114/#ixzz3xNPnYrls

Battle scars on male mastodon tusks show these Ice Age giants were not the peaceful creatures once thought... The scars reveal they fought in brutal combat each year during seasonal phases of heightened sexual activity and aggression. The discovery, announced at a recent Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Ontario, counters the view that now-extinct mastodons were peaceful, passive creatures that rarely engaged in battles. It also strengthens the link between mastodon and modern elephant behaviour, since male bull elephants also fight seasonal, hormonally-charged battles to show their dominance and win desired mates... "Mastodon tusks curve upward strongly at the...

Elephants, Human Ancestors Evolved in Synch, DNA Reveals Hope Hamashige for National Geographic News July 23, 2007 The tooth of a mastodon buried beneath Alaska's permafrost for many thousands of years is yielding surprising clues about the history of elephants—and humans. A team of researchers recently extracted DNA from the tooth to put together the first complete mastodon mitochondrial genome. The study, published in the journal PLoS Biology, significantly alters the evolutionary timeline for elephants and their relatives. The research may put to rest a contentious debate by showing that woolly mammoths are more closely related to Asian elephants than...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

<p>Calle the ailing elephant died at the San Francisco Zoo on Sunday morning, hours after another elephant attacked her -- an attack that zoo officials are blaming on animal rights demonstrators who they say agitated the beasts.</p> <p>Zoo veterinarians quietly euthanized Calle, a 37-year-old female Asian elephant, at about 5 a.m., after she dropped to her belly and rolled on her side.</p>

SAN PASQUAL VALLEY – For 50 years she called San Diego County home. That's why animal-welfare activists are upset that Peaches, the oldest African elephant in the country, died earlier this week at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Activists are criticizing the San Diego Wild Animal Park for its decision to move Peaches and two other older elephants, Wankie and Tatima, to the cold-weather city in early 2003. With two of those elephants now dead, they called the move "grossly irresponsible." Peaches, 55, died of "complications due to old age," according to Lincoln Park officials. She was found lying on the...

The good news is that even though TB is highly contagious, the three infected elephants at the zoo did not spread the disease to visitors, including those who attended one of Rama's painting parties in which he created splatter paintings. About 5 percent of the captive Asian elephants in North America are infected. The disease can be deadly to elephants. Three pachyderms at an exotic animal farm in Illinois died from the disease between 1994 and 1996, according to the CDC. One handler in that outbreak got sick as well. At the Oregon Zoo, the first case popped up in...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

This magnificent, unknown  elephant was taken in a successful, legal, ethical, hunt in Zimbabwe.  The bull elephant had never been seen before, and likely would have died with no one knowing of its existence if the hunt had not taken place.From telegraph.co.uk:Mystery surrounded the identity of the elephant, which was estimated to have been between 40 and 60 years old, but had never been seen before in Zimbabwe’s southern Gonarezhou National Park.But its tusks, which touch the ground in a photograph taken moments after its shooting, confirmed its exceptional nature, weighing an estimated 120lb each. Social Justice Warriors (SJW)...