Even by liberal estimates world population of Elephants are placed at 5 to 6 lakh out of which only 10% constitute Asian elephants. Their sheer physical size demands huge volume of food to be consumed if they are to carry out their day to day activities. On an average an elephant can weight 4-6 tons though there are reports of jumbos with 12 ton weight. Their food consists of roots, barks, grass, leaves, berries, seedpods, many fruits and they are known to eat about 140-270 kg, almost 16 hours a day, drinking about 180-200 liters of water. As their digestive efficiency is low, almost 60% of the food ingested is not digested and they live for 50-70 years. Imagine the amount of food required to sustain a population of half a million jumbos that roam around the forests in Asia and Africa! Probably due to the ever shrinking forests, elephants are increasingly foraying into human habitats bringing about massive destruction of agricultural crops in their trail. It is surprising why the human ingenuity was not able to come out with a solution to the "elephantine" problem of feeding the hungry jumbos and spare the forests. Such a development was recently reported from Thailand.
"Recently, six Thai elephants gave a big trunks-up to the first packaged food substituted for the rapidly disappearing plants they are used to eat, said a zoo official in Bangkok. "The elephants at Bangkok's Dusit zoo all ate with gusto when fed for several months with chewable tablets made of concentrated sugar, cane, corn, molasses, vitamins and mineral,' said Alongkorn Mahannop, the zoo's director. "The half-kilogram, inch-long tablets will be tested in other zoos and the country's northern jungles"
What is not clear is whether elephants will really be satisfied with a tablet to satiate their hunger and how it can fill up its large GI tract to preempt the urge to eat. If the feed in the form of tablet really works, the contribution by Thailand will be remembered by animal activists as well as the environmentalists for ever!
V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com
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