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40d:Elephant
Elephants are large peaceful creatures who wander in any tropical forest and in tropical shrublands.
Killing an elephant will yield 16 edible portions of meat and up to 10 portions of fat.
Elephants can be tamed but cannot be trained -- the only "war animals" presently available in the game are dogs. Elephants maintain their previous behaviors-- they run from or ignore threats unless attacked.
Uses For elephants
Having swarms of wild elephants outside your fortress can be a good thing. Marksdwarfs receive a load of experience for hitting an elephant with a bolt, usually bumping their marksdwarf skill a few levels before killing one. Traders will pay a LOT for even an untamed elephant, so they make good trade items. Elephant produce a stack of 16 bones when butchered, and these can be used to make a stack of 80 bone bolts, meaning your marksdwarfs will have plenty of shots before needing to gather more ammo. If you modify your game files to make elephants trainable, War Elephants can form a terrifying assault force.
In real life
Elephants are generally peaceful creatures, very intelligent and attached to the family, and hunted to near extinction for their ivory. Thanks to improved measures against illegal poaching, the population of wild elephants has grown to three times its former size just ten years ago.
Recently, attacks to humans by elephants have increased; it's been noted that many elephant family groups have a marked lack of adult females, so the attacks may be the result of elephant calves being orphaned by hunter action and growing up without the elephantine equivalent of social education.
In prior versions
Elephants used to be the most feared and revered animal in the history of DF, their brutality unmatched. One good example of this was Boatmurdered; packs of elephants would suddenly attack and eat dwarves, their enormous tusks gleaming red with blood. Such was their brutality that they were named the king of all beasts, and a undead elephant was a symbol in itself in dwarven culture and society to mean brutality, terror, death and destruction.
In more recent versions (0.27.176.38c onward) elephants' aggressiveness has been toned down, though carp and giant eagles have been more than willing to pick up the slack.