Can we be inspired by the way this elephant mocks this rhino?

Weird Dave posts this tweet in the Ace of Spades blog of an elephant mocking a rhino. That makes me think about what we elephants should be doing to the RINOS in the GOP!

pic.twitter.com/ny2LoGwARm

— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) February 15, 2020

African Farmers Are Setting Up Rows Of Beehives By Their Land, But It's Not Because They Want Honey

Archit Tripathi writes at Wimp (yes, that's the name of the website),

Farms in east Africa have a pretty big problem - literally. Wandering elephants are a major concern and can be devastating to farmers. One solution is to dig a massive ditch and some reinforced fencing but that's hardly practical due to the expense. Unfortunately, without some kind of protection, farmers trying to defend their crops leads to frequent injuries and deaths of both farmers and elephants. Thanks to zoologist Lucy King, however, that's all about to change.

King noticed that elephants are terrified of bees, because the pain of getting stung inside their trunks is absolutely unbearable and there's little they can do to soothe themselves afterwards. Elephants instinctively avoid bees and just the sound of a buzzing bee is enough to make an elephant vacate the area immediately. She wondered if beehives suspended at regular intervals might make an effective barrier against elephants. After a wildly successful test run in 2009, The Elephants and Bees Project was officially started shortly thereafter.

Today there are active beehive fences in Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Sri Lanka. Besides being great at keeping elephants away, the bees are also incredibly useful for pollinating crops and farmers can also harvest the honey they make for an additional revenue stream. It's truly an awesome example of using something so simple and small to solve such a big problem.

The Elephants and Bees Project is currently raising funds to expand the program even further. If you'd like to get involved, click here.

h/t Krista Kafer

Elephants are cool

Mama gives birth, then her friends come over to help the baby stand up.

Read more here.

The most expensive cup of coffee in the world

Want some coffee? These beans are the most expensive coffee beans in the world. Here are the folks who collect the beans for Black Ivory Coffee in Thailand.

'It's a unique taste,' said Barbara Schautz, a German tourist, adding she could detect notes of caramel and chocolate in the brew.

'It's not bitter at all.'

Dan Nosowitz reports for Modern Farmer,

What makes it so rare and so special? Well, it’s digested first. By elephants. Who eat it and then excrete it. The Daily Mail reports on the wildly successful Black Ivory Coffee, which could uncharitably but accurately be called “elephant poop coffee.”

Coffee beans aren’t beans at all; they’re the seeds of a fruit called the coffee cherry. The reason a plant creates fruits is to spread its seed. If an animal is enticed by the fruit and eats it, it inevitably excretes the indigestible seed somewhere else. This allows plants to “travel” and expand their range. This happens with coffee as much as any other plant; plenty of animals like to eat the coffee cherries. And, oddly enough, the digestive system of these animals has been found to actually make those excreted coffee beans taste better to us. The theory is that the various acids in an animal’s stomach work to denature the proteins, which are responsible for some of the bitterness in coffee.

This year, due to increased demand, the entire run of coffee beans is sold out. To get a cup, you’ll have to book a flight to Singapore, Hong Kong or Thailand and visit a select few five-star hotels. Or head to Texas, but call first. Cups of Black Ivory Coffee are going fast.

Read more here.

No more chains; she's free now!

Two old friends.

Do Elephants Have Souls?

Caitrin Nicol writes in The New Atlantis

They are not us, but to look into their eyes is to know that someone is in there. Imposing our own specific thoughts and feelings on that someone is in one sense too imaginative, in presuming he could receive the world in the way we do, and in another not imaginative enough, in not opening our minds to the full possibilities of his difference.

Nicol includes this from Peter Mathieson's The Tree Where Man Was Born,

There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, an ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

Nicoli continues,

The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life.

After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. Over time, with practice and guidance, it will find the potential Welcome to the world: This newborn hasn’t yet stood up and stretched its legs, let alone figured out how to use its trunk. “Elephant Nature Park” by Christian Haugen (CC BY 2.0). in this appendage flailing off its face to breathe, drink, caress, thwack, probe, lift, haul, wrap, spray, sense, blast, stroke, smell, nudge, collect, bathe, toot, wave, and perform countless other functions that a person would rely on a combination of eyes, nose, hands, and strong machinery to do.

From some combination of existential loneliness and intrepid curiosity, we also have for decades now been calling out for someone past the borders of our known experience. Meanwhile, although we’ve been working on it for millennia, the real depths of terrestrial intelligence are almost as unplumbed. Whether there are millions or just one, what does it mean that there is such a thing as Elephant?

The scientific enterprise, that special activity of human beings, brings us proof of their abilities and tools to unriddle them, but scientific language simply breaks down in describing who they are — as it does with beauty or with love — leaving us at the edge of a vast field of signals out of ordinary range. Listen with your ears, your eyes, your heart, your mind, your soul for the message from these kin as improbable as life itself, different and yet the same. We are not alone.