Elephant Poo

A guy from Zimbabwe who worked with elephants taking rich Americans on elephant back Safari's, once told me that many African tribes believe that elephant poo has great healing properties and is often used by pregnant women. The strange thing about this is not that they think elephant poo has healing properties, but that it actually may have.

The average elephant eats between 200 and 250 kilograms of food a day, which is why they appear to be eating all day long. The reason they eat so much is not purely greed, but the fact that their bodies get less than 50% of the nutrients and minerals contained in the food they eat, so to get enough nutrients and minerals, they have to eat a hell of a lot.

Now from this 200 to 250 kilograms of food they produce about 50 kilograms of poo each day, which if the elephant is in good health will have no smell. So as you can see the poo is a high concentration of the food it eats and if you add to that the fact that over 50% of the nutrients and minerals are still in it, it makes sense that it could have healing properties.

Now the big question is and I never asked my Zimbabwe poo expert, but how do you administer this nutrient and mineral rich potion. Is it made into a liquid and used as a lotion and rubbed on infected areas, or drank as a tonic. Is it dried and cut up and swallowed like a pill, or do you burn it and inhale the vapour. Which ever way its administered elephant poo as a healing agent may not be as crazy as it seems. Quite how you market the product is another thing all together and maybe the Achilles heal in this whole story. Still I bet the bloody Chinese would buy it and use it and who knows, it may wean them off using rhino horn to boast their sexual performance, which to me sounds a whole lot crazier than elephant poo medicine.

Currently in South Africa alone, 2.7 rhino's are killed every day by poachers, who often shoot the animal and use chain saws to cut the horns off their faces whilst they are still alive. Sadly their horns are worth an absolute fortune to the average African poacher, because the Chinese pay a fortune for them. I am convinced rhino horn doesn't improve your sex life, its the wrong type of horn for a start off. In fact I think I am right in saying that the only side effect of drinking ground up rhino horn is you have a high tendency to head butt Land Rovers.

But its not just ground up rhino horn, the Chinese are also responsible for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of sharks being killed in horrific ways across the world. Sharks are caught and have their fins cut off, before the animal is thrown back into the sea finless to die a long slow death. Good old Gordon Ramsay proved that shark fin soup is 100% tasteless and is just a watery mess except for one thing, its very, very expensive. Which means that the whole shark fin soup thing is driven by rich Chinese who like to show off in front of their friends by ordering the soup. I have a feeling that ground up rhino horn is perhaps the same story, a very expensive and totally useless status symbol. I bet somewhere right now in Beijing there is a posh party with the millionaire host offering his guests ground up rhino horn, not to boost their shagging ability, but to show how rich he is.

Hang on, the real question is how many rhino's are there, divide that by 2.7 and we then will know how many days it will be before they become extinct and the rich Chinese are forced to move on to some new and equally stupid way of pushing their wealth down peoples throats.