With huge ears, ivory tusks, and a long trunk, the African elephant is the largest land animal on earth. A bull elephant can grow up to 4m tall and weigh up to 7 tonnes, while a female can weigh in at around 3.5 tonnes. When you’re that big, it takes a lot of food to fill you up! An elephant’s daily food intake can be as much as 4-7% of its body weight.

An elephant’s diet of roots, grasses, fruit, leaves, and bark is not high in nutrition, which means they have to go for quantity over quality. A really hungry adult elephant can consume as much as 275kg of food in a single day, although usually, it’s around half of that. Such voracious appetites mean an elephant spends up to 16 hours a day eating. If you combine that with the huge distances they roam to find the quantities of food required to sustain their massive bodies, it means there’s not much time left for sleeping!

Now let’s face it, what goes in must come out, and with all that eating, elephants can produce up to 100kg of dung in a day (to put this in perspective, the average giant panda weighs 100kg!). An estimated 130,000 elephants occur seasonally in Botswana, meaning they produce about 13,000 tons of manure daily. There’s an old proverb, “Waste Not, Want Not,” and with such vast quantities of “waste,” it’s not surprising that people have come up with some creative uses for the stuff that comes out the back end of an elephant.

Let’s look at some of the things you can do with all that poop.

1. Paper

This is one of my personal favourites.

Elephants have rather inefficient digestive systems, only digesting around 45% of what they eat. Elephants are herbivores with very high fibre diets, so much of this undigested matter passes straight through them pretty much intact. Regular paper is made from wood fibre pulp, but a similar pulp can be derived from the fibres in elephant dung.

Botshelo Sesinyi, founder of Life with Elephants Project, explains the process - “After washing the dung, clean fibres remain. The fibre is then boiled for four hours in a vat to thoroughly ensure it is clean. After that, much of the process is similar to that of making regular paper.” Sesinyi goes on to say, “125 sheets of A4 paper can be produced from each 50kg”. The dung can also be made into crafts and souvenirs.

2. How About Something To Drink?

You’ve probably heard of those (somewhat unethical) coffee beans that pass through the digestive systems of caged civets. The beans are collected from the civet’s waste; then washed, dried and roasted, before being sold for crazy sums of money. Someone in Thailand has come up with a similar idea, but on a much larger scale! Instead of civets, a herd of captive elephants is excreting coffee beans that are made into coffee. Black Ivory Coffee produces about 250kg annually of what they call “the rarest coffee in the world,” and serves it in five-star resorts across Asia and the Middle East. The fermentation process elephants use to digest the cellulose in their food apparently brings out the sweet, fruity flavours in the beans and gives the coffee a chocolatey, cherry taste — but at $120 for just over a gram, I have to be honest and say I haven’t tasted it! (I’ve heard a rumour that for $500 a pound, the only shop outside of Asia that sells it is somewhere in Texas).

As far as I’m aware, no one is producing elephant coffee in Africa, but there’s definitely something I can suggest to add to your drinks cabinet or next sundowners — Indlovu Gin. This is gin that has been infused with “botanicals foraged by elephants,” and sourced from their poop. The elephant dung is dried and goes through a sanitising process, then rinsed and dried again, before the final dry product is infused into gin. Does it taste like poop, you may ask? Les Ansley, who together with his wife, founded Indlovu Gin, says “It’s got an earthy, grassy-type flavour… depending on where we collect the botanicals or which elephants we collect botanicals from, the gin flavour is going to change slightly.” At $34 a bottle (with 15% of the profits going to the Africa Foundation to Support Elephant Conservation), this is a good souvenir of your African travels.

If you are looking for another novelty elephant-themed drink. let me point you in the direction of Japan’s Sankt Gallen Brewery and its beer called Un Kono Kuro, it’s made using coffee beans that have passed through an elephant, before undergoing alcoholic fermentation. The beer was so successful that initial stocks sold out online within minutes of its launch.

3. Insect Repellent

The African bush is an amazing place to spend some time, but you can find you are sharing the bush with a bunch of unwanted insect visitors — from ankle-biting tsetse flies out on a game drive, to mosquitoes buzzing around your ears at night. And what happens if you don’t have insect repellent?

Luckily, I am not going to advise you to rub elephant poop on yourself! But what I am going to suggest is that you find yourself the nearest lump of dried elephant dung and light it. By burning a dried-up piece of dung, you can chase away most of those buzzy buggers, and the smell is much less offensive than most of those sprays.

Numerous of Africa’s national parks are renowned for tsetse flies, and it can really ruin your afternoon game drive when these bloodsuckers swoop in to inflict you with painful and itchy bites. My first encounter with elephant dung as an insect repellent was when our guide hung a tin of smouldering elephant dung from the back of our game drive vehicle, and the biting flies, who always seem to find me particularly tasty, disappeared, almost instantly.

4. A Source Of Water

I sincerely hope you will never find yourself in the situation where squeezing a few drops of moisture out of a lump of fresh elephant poop is your only chance of survival. But let me tell you if you are ever lost or stranded, and out of water (in a place where elephants roam), the solution is at hand. Grab yourself a handful of fresh elephant dung and squeeze! But won’t it make me ill, you ask? No, elephant dung has surprisingly little bacteria, and let’s face it, any water is probably better than none in an emergency!

5. Medicinal

Elephants eat a wide variety of fruits and foliage. Traditional healers use many of these very same plants in natural remedies. Elephant excrement can actually be used as a pain relief medicine. Simply inhaling the smoke of smouldering elephant dung is said to work wonders on headaches or toothaches, and it’s also said to work to stop nose bleeds and unblock sinuses.

6. Fertiliser

Subsistence farmers have been using elephant dung as fertiliser for generations. With such poor digestive systems, elephants’ dung makes for excellent compost.

7. Biogas

Some zoos and sanctuaries are starting to make use of elephant dung, which, with the help of biogas digesters, can be used to generate gas for stoves, heat, and even electricity. With the sheer quantity of “material” the elephants provide, they are perfect candidates for this process. The digesters break down the organic waste and collect the methane and carbon dioxide produced. The bio-slurry created as a side product is a great fertiliser.

8. A Home For Wildlife

Granted, this last use for elephant dung isn’t really for us humans, but a lump of elephant dung acts as a home to many creatures. Scientists call elephants “ecosystem engineers.” Their feasting on trees and shrubs in forests creates pathways for smaller animals to move, and on the savannahs, they uproot trees and eat saplings, helping to keep the landscape open for plains animals to thrive. Numerous insects make their home in piles of elephant poop, including beetles, scorpions, crickets, termites, and millipedes – which is why on a game drive your vehicle should never drive over any elephant dung you find on the road. As well as being a highly nutritious home for these smaller creatures, it also benefits those who, in turn, want to eat those creatures. Honey badgers, mongooses, monkeys and a variety of birds will all scratch through dung piles, snacking on the bugs and grubs they find. To top it off, elephant dung is full of seeds, helping spread plants far and wide.

Sarah Kingdom

Travel writer, mountain guide, yoga teacher, trail runner and mother, Sarah Kingdom was born and brought up in Sydney, Australia. Coming to Africa at 21 she fell in love with the continent and stayed. Sarah guides on Kilimanjaro several times a year, and has lost count of how many times she has stood on the roof of Africa. She has climbed and guided around the world and now spends most of her time visiting remote places in Africa. When she is not traveling she runs a cattle ranch in Zambia with her husband.

Eight Unexpected Uses For Elephant Dung

Sarah Kingdom