jack
The Legendary Troll Kingdom
I was recently asked a reasonable and intelligent question on elephants. One thing led to another, and after a bit of research I discovered the fascinating world of elephant masturbation. If you want to collect sperm from a (captive) elephant, how do you do it? Luckily youtube provides the answer. It seems that manual stimulation of the penis (1) just doesn't do it for elephants, and (2) is physically dangerous (read on), so you have to stick your arm into the animal's rectum and vigorously stimulate its prostate gland. How vigorously? Watch the video. The eventual result - and I'm not entirely sure how long this takes - is ejaculation...
Of course male elephants don't (ordinarily, so far as we know) have any trouble ejaculating when interacting sexually with other elephants, and may ejaculate prematurely during their efforts to achieve successful penetration (Bagemihl 1999). It can take (presumably inexperienced) males a bit of rooting around with the flexible penis before finding the vulva. As is well known, the elephant vulva is not located just beneath the tail as is the case in most mammals, but down on the ventral surface and well between the legs, meaning that the vagina is very long (70-90 cm). This unusual position means that pregnancies are sometimes unnoticed and even that females have on occasion been mistakenly identified as male: Shoshani (1991) wrote of a case where a female was thought to be a male throughout her 25 years of life and was only found to be female on her death. Why elephants are built like this has been a long standing question.
Of course male elephants don't (ordinarily, so far as we know) have any trouble ejaculating when interacting sexually with other elephants, and may ejaculate prematurely during their efforts to achieve successful penetration (Bagemihl 1999). It can take (presumably inexperienced) males a bit of rooting around with the flexible penis before finding the vulva. As is well known, the elephant vulva is not located just beneath the tail as is the case in most mammals, but down on the ventral surface and well between the legs, meaning that the vagina is very long (70-90 cm). This unusual position means that pregnancies are sometimes unnoticed and even that females have on occasion been mistakenly identified as male: Shoshani (1991) wrote of a case where a female was thought to be a male throughout her 25 years of life and was only found to be female on her death. Why elephants are built like this has been a long standing question.
