Why does elephant scared of mouse

The reason people think that elephants are scared of mice is that they could nibble on their feet and can climb into their trunks and suffocate them — too be fair that is quite scary. Even in the s an Irish doctor, Allen Moulin, believed that Elephants were scared of mice as they have no epiglottis — a flap of cartilage that covers the windpipe when swallowing — and so if I mouse crawled into its mouth it would suffocate.

Moulin said he had observed elephants sleep with their trunks close to the ground , and said this was probably so that rodents could not get into them whilst they slept. It is unlikely that a mouse would get all the way up an elephants long trunk, Image by Megan Coughlin via Flickr. Josh Plotnik, a researcher of elephant behaviour and intelligence which sounds like an amazing job said that elephants have quite poor eyesight and therefore may just be startled when a small animal such as a mouse scurries past their feet.

This might explain why the circus elephants were not scared by the mice held up to their heads as they were not running around their feet and startling them. I agree, but I have two that say that elephants are afaird of mice and now I have two because of this website. I love these kinds of debunking blogs.

I never really thought about it but I guess it makes sense that you would be afraid of anything that resembles something like a hyena. My eyesight sucks, so I feel for elephants now. This was such an interesting read! I always just assumed the fallacy to be true. Thanks for shedding some light on this topic!

Your post was a really interesting read alasairs! Some have said the claim started with Pliny the Elder in A. It's more likely that elephants, which have relatively poor eyesight, simply become startled when mice dart past. John Hutchinson, a researcher at the structure and motion lab of the Royal Veterinary College in London, agreed: "Elephants get a bit nervous sometimes when small, fast animals are around them," he said.

The elephant really did not like the barking, sprinting animal around it, especially when it couldn't see where the dog was. The elephant panicked, running off into the nearby jungle. A reporter and the circus elephant's trainer held mice in their hands and showed them to several elephants; apparently the elephants "only looked bored" and "not one of them seemed to care much. So rather than being afraid of the mouse itself, an elephant is most likely just surprised by its quick, frantic movements.

The mouse-in-the-trunk myth, for example, seems to date back centuries to the ancient Greeks, who reportedly told fables about a mouse that climbed into an elephant's trunk and drove it crazy. Some have said the claim started with Pliny the Elder in A. Apparently, in the late s, an Irish physician named Allen Moulin was trying to figure out why such big pachyderms might quiver at the sight of such a small rodent as a mouse, according to Christopher Plumb's "The Georgian Menagerie: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century London" I.

Tauris, Moulin reasoned that since elephants had no epiglottis — the flap of cartilage that covers the opening to the windpipe when swallowing — the big creatures could be "worried" that a mouse might crawl up their trunk and suffocate them, Plumb wrote. However, as biologists today know, elephants are equipped with that fleshy windpipe cover.