An elephant family smashed pumpkins at the Oregon Zoo. But this baby just wanted to play ball

PORTLAND PARISH – A child elephant on the Oregon Zoo had extra methods than treats to point out when handlers gave it a small pumpkin to play with throughout an annual fall occasion the place big elephants smash half-ton pumpkins.

Weighing simply 775 kilos (351.5 kilograms), eight-month-old Asian elephant Tula-Tu is concerning the heft of one of many big pumpkins so is just too small to smash them. As an alternative, zoo handlers gave her a small pumpkin to observe with. The little elephant dribbled the gourd round like a soccer ball, a video from the zoo exhibits.

Her elephant household on the Oregon Zoo loved the massive pumpkins on Oct. 16 on the annual “Squishing of the Squash,” a practice that goes again to 1999 when a farmer donated a pumpkin weighing 828 kilos (376 kilograms). The donated pumpkins have gotten bigger, round 1,000 kilos (450 kilograms) this 12 months, due to aggressive hobbyists on the Pacific Large Vegetable Growers Membership.

To interrupt open the gargantuan gourds, zookeepers current them to Tula-Tu’s grownup kinfolk like her brother and father who weigh barely over 10,000 kilos (4,500 kilograms). In a video from the zoo, they seem to delicately place one foot on the prime, and gently press down. The pumpkins crack with a loud pop, sending rind and seeds flying.

Previous years’ movies have proven midsized, younger elephants placing each ft on prime of the pumpkins however being too mild — or missing method — so the enormous greens do not burst.

This 12 months the adults elephants smashed the huge pumpkins in entrance of a cheering crowd of zoo guests, after which the household of elephants ate the numerous tons of squash fragments.

Asian elephants like Tula-Tu and her household are thought-about extremely endangered, in response to Oregon Zoo officers. There’s a fragmented inhabitants of round 40,000 to 50,000 such elephants within the wild in locations starting from India to the Malaysian island of Borneo. However there have been profitable conservation milestones in recent times, including in Cambodia.