Animal Diaries Archive

Muddy Good Time!!!

21 December 2007

A GIGANTIC hello and welcome to yet another edition of Elephant Diaries. Today I'm going to give you an insight on the benefits of mud, well at least if you're an Elephant anyway. If you take a look at the photo's you will see the new mud wallow that the elephant team designed. It's nice to see the finished product looks a lot like the original drawing.

Elephants are a highly intelligent animal and need a lot of stimulation through out the day, however we can also stimulate them by altering the enclosure slightly, for example adding log stacks, and as we did relocating the mud wallow. The new mud wallow has a lot more structure around it for the girls to try and move or drag. Elephants love mud wallows and will spend a lot of time through out the day going back and forth reapplying the mud. Mud and dry dirt is extremely important to the everyday life style of elephants. You see it does a number of different things for them. First of all it works like sun screen and protects the skin, also elephants have such a large exposed skin area it also protects them from a lot of annoying biting insects. Most importantly wet mud also helps to keep a high moisture requirement for their skin as elephants generate a lot of body heat which tends to dry the skin out. You may also see elephants in the cooler months with a thick coating of mud on them which works like insulation minimizing heat loss from the skin. So as you can see, mud is an extremely important part of the elephant's day. But let's face it we all used to like playing in the mud, elephants just never grow up!!!

Until our next edition, take care and go and play in the mud "it's good for the skin!!!"

The Elephant Team.