Hey! It’s Christie. Today we were at Peter and Marianne’s house, and Peter’s friend was over. They were doing stuff with dinosaurs and suddenly Peter’s friend said something that really made me think. We were talking about how much we love elephants and how they might die out soon. And then Peter’s friend said that one day we might think of elephants the same way we think of dinosaurs — as giants in the past, like huge mysteries that we don’t know.
All I know is, that would be the worst.
We’ve been asked to do a report on an endangered species, and Marianne and I got to do elephants. We’ve been learning a lot about them and why they’re endangered. There are a lot of reasons why, of course, but one of them is related to Mandy’s last post about the elephant wars. Sometimes only daddy elephants have tusks, and so they’re the ones that get poached. But that means that families don’t have a daddy to teach them how to behave, and sometimes boy elephants grow up and become really angry. They seek revenge on the people who have taken their food, their water, and their land, or on people have hurt their family. Then they go wild and trample villages into the ground. This makes the people really angry, so they go out and hunt more elephants. It’s one big, bad cycle. Part of what we’re trying to do now is work with Pink Elephant to stop this. We talk to people about sharing their resources with elephants, and we talk to elephants about trying not to go crazy on the people and to control themselves.
You can help us, too! Learning more is always the first step to helping, because that way you know what to do! Mandy and Marianne and Peter and I have recently joined the World Wildlife Fund, and you should join, too! It’s free, and you can sign up to be a member and learn more about elephants and other animals that live together with elephants.
