Remember

This elephant was one of three at a Renaissance Festival being used for kiddie elephant rides. They showed such emotion for each other... I was waiting for a nearby comedy show to start when I went over to get some shots of the elephants. There were only two in the pen and they were just standing in the middle eating fresh hay. When suddenly one of the keepers asked me and some others to make way while he opened a gate and they brought a third one in from doing the little parade that they do. As soon as the elephant entered the pen all three elephants started making sounds, small trumpets and grunts, and all three let loose their bladders. They took the just arrived elephant over to a shaded area to hose it down and cool it off but while they were manurving her the other two were straining at foot chains that I had not noticed before trying to get to touch the elephant that had just arrived, it was heart wrenching to see. After they had gotten the gate closed they removed the foot chains and the elephants were able to touch one another and you could tell that they were relaxing from it.

African elephants are the elephants of the genus Loxodonta (Greek for 'oblique-sided tooth'), consisting of two extant species: the African bush elephant and the smaller African forest elephant. Loxodonta is one of the two existing genera in the family Elephantidae. Although it is commonly believed that the genus was named by Georges Cuvier in 1825, Cuvier spelled it "Loxodonte". An anonymous author romanized the spelling to "Loxodonta", and the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) recognizes this as the proper authority.

The African elephant is the largest living terrestrial animal. Its thickset body rests on stocky legs, and it has a concave back. Its large ears enable heat loss. Its upper lip and nose forms a trunk. The trunk acts as a fifth limb, a sound amplifier and an important method of touch. The African elephant's trunk ends in two opposing lips, whereas the Asian elephant trunk ends in a single lip. Males stand 3.2–4.0 m (10–13 ft) tall at the shoulder and weigh 4,700–6,048 kg (10,360–13,330 lb), while females stand 2.2–2.6 m (7–9 ft) tall and weigh 2,160–3,232 kg (4,762–7,125 lb).

The largest recorded individual stood four metres (13.1 ft) to the shoulders and weighed 10 tonnes (10 long tons; 11 short tons).(Via Wikipedia)