The Elephant Sanctuary

The day before the last day of school we took the middle school students to visit The Elephant Sanctuary, about an hour's drive north of us.  You can visit the link to read more about the program but basically the three sanctuary locations are places to shelter elephants needing care. They are eventually released back to the wild or stay on at one of the sanctuaries as teaching elephants. It is a very interactive program where you learn all about the elephant's anatomy, get to feed the elephants and even pet them and receive a little peck on the cheek.  After having experienced that first hand, I can tell you elephants are slobbery, smelly creatures whose aroma stays with you long after you wash your face and hands! Other surprising facts I learned about elephants- they have incredibly long eyelashes, their skulls look like a honey comb on the inside. A solid skull would be too heavy for an elephant to hold up. An elephant's trunk has 100,000 muscles units in it and elephants use their trunks as a nose, a mouth and a hand. Without their trunks, elephants could not survive. Elephants use their tusks to scrape bark off trees to eat and will do this with only one tusk. If the right tusk is shorter, then the elephant is right-tusked and uses the right tusk for scraping. If the left tusk is shorter, the opposite is true. 

One of my smallest students feeding one of the biggest elephants!