Saturday, February 19, 2011

For Steve Robinson--Homely Male Elephants




Steve, In my opinion "homely" is long legged, small, sunken headed, stiff ears, skinny trunk, long thin tusks, with no girth at the base(third elephant), often growing in a direction to give the look of "buck teeth,"(fourth elephant) or worse no tusks at all, as we see above.(although the second elephant has a "decent" head and was born with tusks, unlike the first elephant). The tall, lanky skinny trunked, sunken headed elephant will often give the mistaken impression that the animal is in poor physical shape, when it is actually only his body structure and how all the parts, head,neck, shoulder, back, hip, etc. tie together which gives that mistaken impression. They look like "sad sacks".



2 comments:

Steve said...

The bull at the top almost looks like Ned. [I know that he's not].

The second bloke could be a woolly mammoth.

But, like CC said - a nice set of pics. Thanks.

Wade G. Burck said...

Steve,
Funny you should mention Ned. I wanted to include him, but I didn't have a decent picture. Maybe "all" elephant's should not be bred, just because they are an elephant. We have all seen a lot of "junk" over the years, and you have to wonder how much of it is genetic, and would have possibly died naturally, and how much of it is environmental and of no consequent to future offspring. With such a small gene pool I think that has to be a major concern. They are not all created equal regardless of who "loves" them, or who owns them.
Wade