Happy New Year! Hope all your dreams come true in 2018.
Here’s an elephant New Year’s kiss for you.
The displays of love and affection among elephants are some of the behaviours that make them so dear to us. However, although this might seem like merely an enjoyable French kiss, the act may actually also serve another purpose.
The elephants are exchanging information by connecting like this through their mouths, an elephant handler explained to me. By ‘kissing, they can find out where the other elephant has travelled from, and what the soil and food was like there, for example. This is research I would love to find out more about!
I met these particular elephants at the Knysna Elephant Park, in the Western Cape. For this and more elephant stories, please check out my new book ‘On the road to elephants.’