Baby elephant in pool: What is Belle's name short for?

Baby elephant in pool – put that into Google and you'll find a throng of videos of Belle, Forth Worth Zoo's newest Asian elephant, playing in a blow up kiddie pool. It's adorable. Just hit play. 

|
Screenshot via YouTube
Baby elephant in pool: Belle splashes and tumbles in a pool while her mother watches at the Fort Worth Zoo in Fort Worth, Texas, last week.

Baby elephant Belle splashing in a pool is the animal-lover's newest Internet sensation. Who is she?

Belle is a 31-day-old female Asian elephant calf born at the Fort Worth Zoo in Fort Worth, Texas. Her name is short for Bluebell, a Texas wildflower. 

She is only the second Asian elephant birth in the zoo's 104-year history. Belle's mother is 40-year-old Rasha and her father, currently on loan to the Denver Zoo, is 43-year-old Groucho. Elephants gestate for 22-months. 

Bluebonnet, the zoo's first Asian elephant calf, was born in 1998. 

Asian elephants have been on the endangered species list in 1976. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Baby elephant in pool: What is Belle's name short for?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2013/0807/Baby-elephant-in-pool-What-is-Belle-s-name-short-for
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe