My favourite animal at the moment

Remember how when you were a kid you had a favorite everything: color, food, pet, friend?

I don’t have a whole lot of favorites these days - but I do have a favorite wild animal:

Elephants!

I love elephants! They are so interesting, smart, capable, and have a very complex social structure (this may be a warning against watching too much Animal Planet).

They’re also great terraformers! The indigenous flora of Africa often has less-than optimal effects on the fauna in the area. What’s the natural solution? Knock crap over!

These four-legged bulldozers take out and redecorate as they see fit and at a rate that would rival 3 house/room/swap/clean reality shows on the learning channel.

OK, and now to up the mush factor, baby elephants are the funniest and most playful creatures. You get so used to an elephant being a slow and lumbering savannah-yachts – but I saw this baby elephant chasing one of those birds that usually ride on the adults. He was lashing his trunk in an attempt to swat it while running. It was hilarious.

Baby elephants can’t really control their trunks as precisely as adults and they tend to flop them around in circles. It cracks me up.

I cannot watch an elephant and stay in a bad mood.

They also use extremely sub-sonic noises to communicate across the savannah. For years biologists thought that it was some sort of radar, or ESP, or something, or something else. Instead of attributing amazing advances to mysterious phenomena, like our president, we know today it is just science. Imagine that.

In any case, elephants, their unfortunate association with Republicans aside, are amazing creatures.

I also like octopods too. But they’re not cute, they’re just amazing.

Animals