Have any of you ever been to elephant habitat and seen the amount of feed available and how elephants forage, didnt think so.

Well I have and it has given me some understanding of how they go about things. While they are messy feeders that destroy as much as they eat and although they need between 400 and 600kg of food a day they are not hungry, there is plenty of feed because of how the herds work. Each herd has a circuit they do through the forest feeding as they go which gives the feeding grounds time to regenerate between each visit.

The plantations of pineapples bananas corn and other fruit are like ice cream and chocolate to the elephants and when their feeding route takes them close to a plantation they take advantage of it and hog in.

There are also individuals mostly young bulls that have been evicted from a herd usually for getting to interested in the females which are the property of the herd bull but there can also be females, I have seen 2 females with calves traveling separate from a herd, possibly they will get together with a young bull and form a new herd.

I have just come back from a place where there are a lot of elephants and farmers in that area have mostly planted the area close to the forests in rubber and palm oil trees that are of no interest to elephants.

However as they have no predators other than man they can increase to the stage where they eat themselves out of house and home but I know of nowhere that has happened as yet.

In this instance I have seen nothing to contradict that this elephant died of an infection from a wound and was probably in the pineapples because of its limited mobility and the ease of which it could get food there.