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Many people submitted questions for our Ask Me Anything request, so we sent some of your requests to Dr. Trish for answers. 

What degrees did you have to have to be a vet for elephants? Where did you first go to take care of them?

I have a DVM from the University of Georgia. I first started working with elephants at The Elephant Sanctuary with Scott in 1997, before I went to vet school. During vet school I did a 1-month internship with Chiang Mai University’s elephant department. There is no specific school course for elephants, it is on-the-job learning. That is why I have spent the past 8 years traveling around Asia and at elephant sanctuaries in France and in the US. 

I’m just curious why the vet for the girls is a horse vet and not an elephant vet? I’ve heard that Lucy in Canada also has a horse vet.

We have several vets for the girls. Dr. Mateus is a vet but also a full-time caregiver and did his residency in exotic medicine, Dr. Luciana is the local horse vet who consults with us and visits every few weeks; she brings knowledge of different specialists in Brazil and practices acupuncture and ozone. Dr. Trish has 8 + years of elephant experience. But horses and elephants have very similar digestive systems and foot problems, so we use many of the same medicines, supplements, and topical treatments made for horses on the elephants. Equine vets have the most transferable experience and knowledge for elephants. 

For training elephants skills like cooperating for foot treatments etc., does the team use clickers (or any other sound producing instrument) like we do for dog training?

We use a whistle which is called a training bridge. We need our hands for working with the elephants, so a clicker isn’t practical. A “bridge” is a signal that indicates an elephant has successfully completed the requested action at that very moment. During early training of a behavior, a bridge is used to let an elephant know they are getting closer or heading in the right direction. This helps to encourage them to continue on in a similar manner and also prevents frustration. While the food reward is the real motivation (and for some elephants, verbal praise or affection) the bridge is what lets them know they did the behavior correctly. For people like me who can’t whistle very well, I do a loud higher pitched “good girl, great job.”

Is the skin of female elephants the same thickness all over their bodies? Does it have an odor? Do they smell different from each other? 

No, the thickness of the skin is different all over their body. It’s thinnest around ears, anus, and armpits and thickest over the back, ribs, and legs. And they do all smell different! And each elephant’s skin can feel different; some have softer skin than others and different amounts of hair. 

When elephants sleep, do their ears still flap? 

I do see elephants flapping their ears when they are sleeping sometimes, but usually not if in a deep sleep. Some of it will depend on ambient temperature and if bugs are around.

Also curious: when they sleep, is it only 4 hours? And they sleep together? 

Every elephant sleeps for different amounts at a time. Some will take several 30 min naps throughout the night, while others will sleep longer, like an hour, and then get up and eat some, then lie back down, possibly on the other side. I see most of the girls sleeping here around 4-5 am. I also am curious if they all sleep at the same time.  As elephants get older they do seem to sleep more and longer. 

Kat added: Maia used to take after-breakfast naps lying down, but she is the only one we’ve seen doing that here. The girls will often lie down one at a time, but then the second or third one ends up usually joining in before the other gets up. We see that here (on the cameras) and we’ve seen it in TN as well. It seems like the elephant who is standing is initially the ‘guard elephant’ and watches over the one who is sleeping. But whether our girls are lazy or they don’t feel any threat, they often give in after 30-60 minutes and lie down with them. 

There are many diseases that were globalized transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks, fleas etc. I wanted to know if girls are immune to these diseases (like leishmaniasis for example)? 

They are not immune as far as I know, but we screen them yearly for a variety of infectious diseases, and they are consistently all negative. There is not a lot of published information about captive elephants and tick or mosquito borne diseases.

If your skin is thick or hard enough that these bugs can’t inoculate them? 

The ticks find those thin skinned areas to attach to and do create quite the swelling in some of the ladies. We do tick checks during treatments and along the fence, especially if we see them swatting somewhere repeatedly. Favorite tick spots on the elephants are behind the ears, on the vulva, around the anus, and in the inguinal area (between the legs). 

 If they can inoculate them, what methods help them to repel them? 

We physically remove ticks and we also use a homemade bug spray. But they coat themselves with mud and that is generally the best bug protection. 

I would like to ask the reasons why Asian elephants can’t coexist with Africans. Both are the same species. What are the differences that separate them?

Asian and African elephants are not the same species!  Asian elephants are elephas maximus and African elephants are loxodonta africana. Not only are they separate species, but they have very different temperaments. What is considered play to an African elephant might be seen as aggression to an Asian elephant. There are many physical, dietary, and communication differences between them. In fact the two species cannot breed and deliver a calf that could survive. The Asian elephant is more closely related to the woolly mammoth than the African elephant. For more information on their differences, click here.