ABOUT THE ELEPHANT

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 December 1936, Page 12

ABOUT THE ELEPHANT

BREATHES OUT FIRE DAMP The elephant veritably breathes out fire damp, a coalmine gas, and likes to gobble hay in great quantities, but dosen’t digest it very well, a scientist has reported, says the “Chicago Tribune.” The presence of the breathed-out coalmine gas was described to the New York Academy of Medicine by Lr. Franscis G. Benedict, directoi’ of the nutrition laboratory of the Car- • negie Institution of Washington, at r Boston. Furthermore, Dr. Benedict said, it’s not true that elephants live to extreme old ages. They don’t do their love making on schedule, either, he added. Dr. Benedict presented the elephant as an interesting laboratory for medical men. His topic was “The Physiological Cace of the Circus Elephant.” There is ont part of methane in an elephant’s breath, he said, for every 100 parts of the common breathing exhaust gas, carbon dioxide. He attributed the formation of methane to intestinal fermentation in the elephant. As a "hay burner” he said the elephant is inefficient. It digests only about 44 per cent, of the hay it eats, compared with digestive uses of 50 to 70 per cent, by cows, steers, sheep, and horses. The circus elephaut eats fully. 150 pounds of hay daily. Out of this main food the animal produces a volume of heat daily equal to that from the bodies of thirty men. This rates the elephant as an inferior heater compared with man, for the thirty average men would weigh 1000 to 1500 pounds less than the average elephant. The animal drinks about fifty gallons of water a day. He takes into his trunk about a gallon and a half at a time. “The extreme ages attributed to elephants are not tiue,” Dr. Benedict raid. “The elephant has about the length of life of a man. An elephant eighty years old is an old animal. The average age of the circus elephant is about thirty-three years. The sex life of elephants appears, he said, to be very irregular. The mating instinct is “not pronounced with most females,” but is “more pronounced in males,” said Dr. Benedivt. Standing up, an elephant breathes ten times a minute; lying quietly, four ti five times. But his heart beats faster lying than standing, thirty-five times a minute, compared with twenty-eight standing.