DON'T MESS WITH AN ELEPHANT

A group of Kenyan elephants actively mine for salt in a cave. Elephants are industrious creatures and humans have long used them as beasts of burden and for doing things like knocking over and moving trees. Thanks to their incredible strength. In some videos, we can see them tearing down fences seemingly just for fun but even on their own they have shown some pretty remarkable ingenuity. For example, if you head to Western Kenya you can find an extinct volcano, an area where an unusual herd of elephants have made their home and these are the only known elephants who will go out of their way to mine salt out of a mountain cave.

These elephants are known to scrape salt from the walls with their tusks. Like deer and other animals, elephants crave that mineral that is difficult to get in their diet normally so the sodium-rich rocks are appealing. Evidence shows that for years elephants have been mining the caves by gouging out Stones full of salt and eating them. It's worth noting that other animals also make use of the caves in their search for salt including Buffalo and the predators of Buffalo but it's only the elephants who can actively mine it.

Elephants can hear each other across miles with their feet. Elephants use infrasounds to communicate the noise our human ears cannot even comprehend. Elephants perceive these sounds because they don't all travel through the air to an elephant's ear instead these deep notes travel through the ground for miles upon miles and other elephants hear them with their feet. The extremely sensitive feet of elephants can feel sound dozens upon dozens of miles away and combining the vibration they pick up with their feet, and the sounds they hear with their ears elephants can pinpoint the direction and location of a sound from dozens of miles away.

Elephants know how to induce labor. Humans have traditionally taken herbs for all kinds of reasons and elephants have also been doing the same thing. Pregnant female elephants were seen consuming an herb that Kenyan women traditionally use to induce labor. The connection between an elephant eating a certain herb and giving birth a few days later meant nothing to researchers at first until they learned of the plant's purpose sometime later.

An elephant once trampled a woman and then came to a funeral to do it again. One thing we all know about elephants is that an elephant never forgets and multiple studies have confirmed that elephants do indeed possess a remarkable long-term memory. While this long-term memory ability is often used to remember the places of watering holes or the places where fellow elephants died, it can sometimes be used in less adorable ways. For example in 2022, it was reported that an elephant had killed a woman in India. The story says she went to collect some water at a river and then for whatever reason an elephant became enraged and trampled her to death. It’s not unheard of for an elephant to do something like this even if the exact reason is not known. Later that same day the people in town were preparing a funeral for that unfortunate woman which is where things get weird and a little horrifying. The elephant reportedly returned to the woman's funeral, took her coffin off the funeral, tossed it into the air, trampled it, and then ran off into the brush. Most people have assumed that it was the same elephant but that cannot be confirmed.

However, it seems just as unlikely that one elephant would trample a woman to death and then a wholly different elephant would show it to do the same thing to a clearly unaggressive corpse. There's no way to know exactly what had happened between the woman and the Elephant but it certainly seemed like the elephant remembered and he was still very angry about it later in the day. That's horrifying! Do not mess with elephants.