Diet of the Asian Elephant

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary Wilson at America's Teaching Zoo at Moorpark College. Elephants eat just about anything that they can get their trunks on. They, once where I worked at the zoo, a patron was upset because they'd seen another zoo visitor feed the elephant a popsicle stick and all. So I went to tell the elephant keeper and he kind of laugh; he said, "Let me show you what I'm feeding them." Now it's just trimmings from the palm trees with big spikes sticking out of them. Their, they can eat just about anything and they need to. They're so, such large animals, they eat throughout the day. They can't go for very long without food. The elephant needs about three hundred pounds of food everyday. So they'll eat grass; which they'll pick up with their, with their trunk and pull it out of the ground. They can also reach up with that trunk and pluck leaves off of the tree. And once they've eaten all the leaves, if there isn't much enough left, they'll even push the tree over and strip the bark from the tree with their tusks; rip the, rip the bark off and eat that as well. Elephants won't stay in one place for very long because they have to keep moving and finding new food all the time. The certain gaiety plain is a place that we often associate with elephants but the certain gaiety plain, there was an eighty year period where there were no elephants there. They have migrated away to another area to feed; so let that environment recover and let the vegetation come back so that when they migrated back, they'll be new food for them."