World News for Students of English

08-01-2016 07:00

A Happy New Year means a happy new baby elephant for Berlin’s Tierpark Zoo. The sanctuary has presented its latest addition, a baby elephant who joined the herd on New Year’s Eve.

Mum Kewa gave birth to her sixth calf without the help of veterinarians or keepers. Zoo workers said the birth was much earlier than expected but that everything went well. And actually in hindsight, the early birth was a good thing, meaning the mother could do it all by herself and even went as far as to say, “we as veterinarians, as keepers, have to realise that sometimes we are not that important.”

The baby elephant is a girl. The little Asian elephant weighs approximately 100 kilograms, which is rather on the light side for an elephant, which may be due to her early birth.

With the birth of the as-yet-unnamed baby, the herd at Tierpark now features six African and seven Asian elephants, after her father, 32-year-old Ankhor, was given away to Prague Zoo in August 2014.

Asian Elephants are endangered, the major threat being loss of habitat and poaching for their ivory tusks.

Difficult words: sanctuary (a safe place for animals), addition (a new member), herd (a group of animals), in hindsight (understanding a situation after some time), due to (because of), endangered (at risk of dying out), habitat (an animal’s natural home), poach (to catch animals illegally), ivory (the material of the tusks), tusk (one of the elephant’s two long “teeth”).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com