Bobby Martinez, age 7, of Hobart, Indiana for his question:

What does an elephant eat?

An elephant can use his fantastic trunk to pick up a peanut or to haul down a mighty branch from a tree. But if you offer him a hamburger or a hotdog, he is not interested. Jumbo is a strict vegetarian and he enjoys almost anything that grows in the plant world. In the wild, he uses his toothy tusks to dig up roots and tubers. With his trunk, he grasp tufts of fresh and dried grasses and stuffs them into his mouth. He also bashes down trees to get their high green foliage and sometimes tears off the bark.

A wild elephant spends most of his waking hours foraging for grasses and leaves, roots and shoots. A wild bull elephant eats about 500 pounds of food a day. In a zoo, a captive elephant is satisfied with one or two large meals a day. His basic daily diet is about 150 pounds of hay, enriched with extra nutrients and enhanced with tasty samples of various plant foods. No elephant eats meat.