Celebrating World Elephant Day 2025

🐘 Today we're celebrating World Elephant Day! 🐘

Here at Noah's Ark Zoo Farm we are home to the largest elephant facility in the UK, Elephant Eden. The state-of-the-art 20-acre habitat has its own swimming pool, heated indoor barn, sand yards, expansive fields and large willow plantation.

Why are bull facilities important? 

Elephant bull facilities are hugely important in the wider African elephant breeding programme, of which we are part of the European bracket. All bull (male) elephants will be forcefully removed from their family groups, at around 9-14 years of age, by the surrounding females i.e their mothers, sisters, aunties and grandmothers. The main reason for this is to avoid any inbreeding in the family unit, once the young bull is starting to develop into sexual maturity.

When the bull has been kicked out of the herd, the safest and smartest thing for him to do is to latch onto the safety and security of a bachelor group, which in the wild presents itself as a large group of loosely associated males of different ages, sizes and therefore different levels of dominancy.

The dominant bulls in the group are responsible for teaching the younger members of the group everything that they need to learn about being a big, successful, dominant, potential breeding bull in the future. As time goes on, the young bull in question will develop socially, mentally, behaviourally and of course physically, as he gets more dominant he will start to move up the ranks and start to teach younger bulls the same things he has been taught!

Meet The Herd...