🍼 Elephant calf

An elephant calf (baby elephant) is the young of a female elephant. It is big at birth: between 50 and 160 kg depending on the species and the zoo, and roughly 66 to 107 cm tall. Soon after birth it stands up and drinks its mother's milk. It does that with its mouth, not its trunk.

The trunk is clumsy at first, and the calf is still learning to use it. A long trunk is not needed for feeding yet. In its first year a calf gains 1 to 1.3 kg a day. From about six months it starts to nibble plants. For several years it also eats its mother's dung, which supplies nutrients and bacteria that help break down cellulose.

Weaning is gradual. San Diego Zoo says that by two or three years a calf no longer needs to nurse. The National Zoo in Washington adds that it can go on until the mother has another calf, and Asian elephants calve only every 3 to 8 years. In captive Asian herds the calves nurse on demand around the clock and are weaned around age four, or earlier if they can forage. A study found that a mother's lack of milk, together with general weakness, mostly in the first year, caused 26.3 percent of calf deaths before age five.

Compare that with a pig: an elephant carries one calf for 21.5 to 22 months, while a sow produces a whole litter of piglets. One calf is a big investment, so the herd helps. Herd mates tend to look out for the little one.

For the other young that drink milk, see who drinks milk: young animals and feeding, and the pages on milk and female elephant.