Why do elephants use thier trunks to greet each other?

Do you ever wave or shake someone’s hand when you greet them? Elephants do not have hands and so use their trunks for many of the actions you would use a hand for. For example, when elephants who know each other meet they might touch trunks or even entwine their trunks together. Trunks also play an important role in smell and moving trunks close together in greeting may be partially to smell each other to gain information that way. This may seem a little funny to a human because we do not communicate much through smell but elephants use smell to learn many things about their surroundings.

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