The Appeal of Elephants

Dogs, cats and horses are usually considered people’s favorite
animals, but elephants are certainly one of the most lovable ones,
too.

For one thing elephants seem extremely empathetic when their kind
suffer and die. Also, they can certainly be known longer, for they
often live up to the age of 70 or so.

Though there are of course many elephants in zoos and though their
early relatives were  in North and South America thousands of years
ago, most native elephants these days are in Africa and Asia. It’s
interesting that those two groups are different enough that scientists
still disagree as to whether they are members of the same species or
not.

African elephants have bigger ears and heads and concave backs,
whereas Asian elephants have smaller ears and heads and convex backs.

Elephants in Africa stand 10 to 13 feet high and weigh between 8,800
and 14,400 pounds,  whereas those in Asian stand seven to 11 feet high
and weigh between 6,600 and 11,000 pounds.

Also, the African ones have two finger extensions at the tip of their
trunk, while the Asian ones have just one, and whereas African
elephants have 21 pairs of ribs, Asian elephants have 19 or 20 pairs.

One of the most amazing parts of any elephant is its trunk. Elephants
not only breathe through their trunks, but they also collect their
huge amounts of food with them before putting it all in their mouths.
In addition, they can hold more than two gallons of water in them  at
a time. Yet their trunks can also do such a delicate job as wiping
their eyes and even flirting with the other sex.

Those trunks are extremely long, reaching up to 23 feet in the air,
but they can also work below ground, obtaining water under sand or
mud.

Another amazing fact about elephants is that they don’t just grow baby
teeth and adult teeth, as we humans do. They get new teeth about six
times during a typical lifetime. It’s also strange that those new
teeth first grow in the back of the mouth and then move forward to
replace the older teeth.  Don’t we older folks wish we could keep
getting new teeth, too!

It’s also interesting that hough elephants are mainly walkers and
runners, they can swim for up to six hours without a break.

And then there’s the Elephants’ intelligence, which is quite
impressive, but then their brains weighs 10-12 pounds compared to ours
which weigh just four pounds.

Pregnancy for elephant mothers takes two years, and most have just one
baby at a time. At birth these babies already weigh about 260 pounds
and are about 33 inches long.

Elephants are much respected by certain religions. Some Buddhists, for
example, believe that Buddha himself was a white elephant before he
was reincarnated as the great leader of his faith.

Perhaps the nicest aspect of elephants is that unlike many other large
animals, they are extremely friendly and generally non-aggressive. I
recommend a delightful story on line, at
http://www.wimp.com/elephantdog/ which tells of the warm, loving
friendship between an elephant and a dog.

It is truly sad, these days, that elephants are killed far too often
simply for ivory. Americans are apparently especially guilty of buying
it, and there is a campaign I hope you will join to try to stop this
practice at http://www.bloodyivory.org/news.

Michigan's Long, Long History

Did you know that our state has been “in the making” for about two billion years? I learned that from a book by Dr. F. Clever Bald, a history professor who got a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught for many years in various schools here in our state, including teaching army, navy and marine trainees at the U. of M.

His book, though it is called “Michigan in Four Centuries,” actually starts out much, much earlier, when, “Elephants Walked in Michigan.” “If you had lived in Michigan eight or ten thousand years ago,” he says at the beginning of his book, “You would very likely have seen mammoths in the upland region.”

As he then explains, “The mammoth was a kind of elephant. It’s body was covered with long, coarse hair and the ivory tusks, and it was . . . . somewhat larger than today’s elephants.” In the lower part of the state, he went on to say, “You certainly would have seen mastodons, which looked much like mammoths and were more numerous.”

We might even have seen a whale or two, for they existed in various deep rivers here in our state and, like all of the animals mentioned above, can still be identified by their fossils.

Indians may have came to Michigan as early as several thousand years ago, certainly long before our first European arrived in about 1620. The Chippewa were mostly in the upper peninsula, the Ottawa in the upper parts of our lower peninsula, and the Potawatomi in the south from Lake Michigan to Detroit.

The Indians were practical, for when they killed animals, they used every part of them. The skin went for clothing and the meat for food. I even read that “front paws and tails were considered special delicacies.”

Dogs were also favorites for eating. Though they had a different concept from ours of how to treat dogs, Indians were nevertheless very loving and very religious. As Bald put it, “Spirits inhabited the bodies of men and animals, and they were also present in trees, rocks, and streams. There were spirits in the sun rain, thunder lightning, and wind.”

Bald even says that they believed the following: “A man’s health or sickness and his good or bad luck in hunting, fishing, planting, or war was dependent on the favors of spirits.” Apparently, though Indians were religious, they didn’t believe in a Hell. According to Bald, there was no punishment after death: “Every spirit went to the pleasant country in the West.”

Medicine Men in each tribe were expected to help Indians who felt they couldn’t obtain what they needed for themselves. As Bald puts it, “a medicine man was priest, sorcerer or physician, as the occasion demanded.”

This fascinating information about earliest Michigan and early Indians is all in the first 19 pages of Bald’s 500-page book about our state.

As he explains, though we only have fossils of the earliest animals, we have many roads which were originally Indian paths. We have a favorite vegetable, corn, which was first cultivated by Indians. We have a sport, lacrosse, which was originally an Indian game. We have canoes, and our bows and arrows were Indians’ invention for hunting.

Also, we have many Indian names such as Shiawassee, Escanaba, Mackinac and Ishpeming, and, of course, the very name of our state.

As Bald says in his preface, our state has had a long and colorful history. “Complacent Indians, restless Frenchmen, conservative Britons and ambitious Americans--all had a share in the beginnings of Michigan.”

Maya Angelou Knows Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The well-known black writer, Maya Angelou, spoke memorably about the problems she went through as a girl in her autobiography called “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” This book, which covered her first 17 years, was just the first of eight that Maya wrote about her life. This one is the most famous, however, and gives a great number of reasons that Maya’s life was never easy, even though she became famous as a speaker and writer.

When she was just three years old, for example, she and Bailey, her four-year-old brother, were sent away by their mother in California and had to take a train to Stamp, Arkansas to live with their grandmother. While they were riding on the train, the porter who was supposed to be in charge, abandoned them in Arizona. After that, the two had to travel the rest of the way with pieces of paper tacked on their bodies, listing their final destination and stating simply, “To Whom It Might Concern.”

Also, even when she was very young Maya constantly heard from others that she was ugly. She has kinky hair and dark skin, and she was always large for her age. 

Her grandmother, whom she called “Mooma,” had a food store in Stamp, and little Maya ate far too much free candy through her childhood. Eventually two of her teeth became downright rotten, and she was in great pain. Her grandmother bravely took her to the office of a local white dentist, one of many folks of both races for whom she had done favors during the difficult 30s.

After they sat for over an hour in the hot sun behind his office, the dentist finally came out and absolutely refused to deal with Maya’s problem. “My policy,” he insisted, “is that I’d rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s.” (The paper left this sentence out!! I certainly didn't mean to show prejudice, but I do understand why they did that.) She and her mother therefore had to travel over 30 miles by bus to have her cared for by a black dentist.

When she was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Freeman. He told her he would kill her brother if she told anyone what had happened. She eventually had to explain in a trial who had raped her, but he didn’t have a chance to kill her brother because he himself was killed very soon after the trial.

By the time she turned 16, Maya worried that with all of her other problems--and perhaps because she was still suffering from being raped--she just might be a lesbian. In order to prove to herself that this was not true, she indulged in sex with a young man, even though she didn’t really care for him. Although this happened only once, she found herself pregnant. She was able to finish high school by hiding her situation as long as possible, but then she had a baby boy whom she had to raise all alone.
True enough, I think Maya would agree that racial prejudice is not as obvious these days as it was in her childhood. 

But still, as Bill Cosby, the black American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist put it so well, “By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.”