ELEPHANTS

The only thing wrong with elephants is…well, you get my meaning.

The elephant animals themselves, however, are somewhat miraculous creatures. I quote from Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language:

The elephant’s trunk is six feet long and one foot thick and contains sixty thousand muscles. Elephants can use their trunks to uproot trees, stack timber, or carefully place huge logs inj position when recruited to build bridges. An elephant can curl its trunk around a pencil and draw characters on letter-size paper. With the two muscular extensions on the tip, it can remove a thorn, pick up a pin or a dime, uncork a bottle, slide a bolt off a cage door and hide it on a ledge, or grip a cup so firmly , without breaking it, that only another elephant can pull it away. The tip is sensitive enough for a blindfolded elephant to ascertain the shape and texture of . In the wild, elephants use their trunks to pull up clumps of grass and tap them against their knees to knock off the drt, to shake coconuts out of palm trees, and to powder their body with dust. They use their trunks to probe the ground as they walk, avoiding pit traps, and to dig wells and siphon water from them. Elephants can walk under water on the beds of deep rivers or swim like submarines for miles, using their trunks as snorkels. They communicate through their trunks by trumpeting, humming, roaring, piping, purring, rumbling, and making a crumpling metal-sound by rapping the trunk against the ground. The trunk is lined with chemoreceptors that allow the elephant to smell a python hidden in the grass or smell food a mile away….HarperPerennial 1994.

Which brings us to another question: How did the Democrats get to be a donkey and the other…you know… We can turn to Google for the answer:

HOW DID THE US PARTIES GET THEIR MASCOTS?

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The donkey and the elephant have been the long-serving animal mascots of the United States’ two major political parties, but how did the animals become such iconic symbols of American democracy?

The Democrats’ donkey is the older of the two symbols, said historian Ken Davis, author of “Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned.” The donkey emerged in 1828 as a kind of insult towards the famously stubborn Democrat Andrew Jackson.

“Andrew Jackson was called a jackass. But he kind of liked it and adopted ‘Jackass Jackson’ as a name,” Davis said. “He was quite comfortable with that idea. And it was not long before the donkey became established as the symbol of the Democratic Party.”

The GOP’s elephant came along years later. The Republican Party wasn’t founded until 1854 in Ripon. The Republican Party grew out of splintered groups that had fractured over the years, including the Whig Party, the Know Nothing Party and other abolitionist coalitions.

“The idea of the elephant was actually discussed at that time, but the image didn’t really come about until the 1870s,” Davis said. “And it’s really Thomas Nast, the famous American political cartoonist who really firms up both of these images in his cartoons, and they become completely linked with the two separate parties by that point.”