Are elephants native to Peru

Answer 1

Someone has written:

"Elephants are native to Africa and Asia, there are no elephants in Peru unless they are African or Asian elephants in zoos."

This is incorrect. There exists a Peruvian elephant that is known as the Peruvian Elephant. This creature is neither African or Asian but is a pachyderm peculiar to Peru. Three breeding pairs were purchased from Peru by Captain Albert Threshfield, a former officer of the Yorkshire Infantry Regiment, The Green Howards, in 1793. In September of 1874, the first Peruvian elephants were hard at work hauling lead ore in the Yorkshire Dales from Swaledale to Richmond.

The Peruvian elephant is [they still exist!] a dwarf compared with its African and Asian relatives. It grows as large as an Irish Wolfhound in height, but is stockier, well muscled, affable, and hard working, capable of carrying huge packs of ingots, which it did uncomplainingly.

The Peruvian has an extremely dexterous trunk and a stocky, powerful build. It also has clawed feet thaty were as useful for climbing the Yorkshire heights as they were for scaling the Peruvian Andes.

The elephants adapted easily to Yorkshire and new generations of calves were born there. The animals became favourites of the lead miners, and several were adopted as domestic pets when their working lives were over.

When the railway came close enough to the lead mines in 1840, the elephants were let free, and their descendants live today in the wild places of Swaledale. Two bouts of disease reduced their numbers. The first was the 1920 outbreak of foot and mouth disease that reduced the great herds, and then an outbreak, believed to be myxomatosis, in the late 1950s reduced the herds even further.

In the Yorkshire magazine, The Dalesman, of April, 1993, Russel Turner in, 'The Elephants of Swaledale,' pp. 50-52, writes:

"A few survive and continue to live high in the hills of Swaledale., far from their South American homeland. Shy and secretive they may be, but they are still there for someone who knows where to find them."

I trust that this puts Peruvian elephants back on the map. It has been the fashion to deny their existence for a couple of hundred years, but you can see them for yourself if you will venture into the high Andes or even into Swaledale.