A newborn elephant weighs around 250 lbs and can’t yet control its own trunk — so how does it eat? The answer changes dramatically over its first few years, and it includes one habit that surprises almost everyone: baby elephants eat their mother’s dung, and they have a very good reason to. Here’s exactly what baby elephants eat, from their first drink of milk to their first mouthful of grass.
The short answer: baby elephants live on their mother’s milk for the first couple of years, starting to sample plants around 4–6 months old. Crucially, they also eat fresh dung from their mother and herd — this is how they acquire the gut bacteria needed to digest plants, which they are not born with.