Elephants are faszinating creatures with a complex social behavior. My connection with elephants comes from the Zoo of Cologne, which opened a new facility for

Elephants are faszinating creatures with a complex social behavior. My connection with elephants comes from the Zoo of Cologne, which opened a new facility for elephants in 2005. Built from scratch to allow keeping up to 20 elephants in a herd, giving them as much freedom as possible. So it is quite large and set up to keep the elephants with minimal interaction with the keepers (protected contact). Starting with 5 elephants, the herd has grown to 14 today, to a large part by births. Whoever visits Cologne and is interested in elphants, shouldn't miss to visit them. The elephant facility is equipped with a wide range of cameras, there is a "control room" for running the camp. In the first years, there was a web stream (anyone remembers real player?) running 24/7 allowing everyone to watch the elephants close up. Especially after in the hours after the zoo is closed for the public, a lot of highly interesting behavior could be observed. The stream for example settled the question: do elephants lie down to sleep? Yes, at about 1am in the morning the would lay down for a few hours, often in a larger group together. The observations via the web cams gave me a deep impression of the social interaction of elphants. They have a lot of individual personality and the groups have a tight social structure and interaction.