Elephants are a popular token of scale in measurements of very large things. Why, asks Anthony Reuben.
Why do I keep hearing about elephants? Hardly any animal-related stories come across my desk. I haven't been asked to do anything about the pandas at Edinburgh Zoo and their chances of conceiving this year. Nobody has asked me to investigate the new regulations relating to grey squirrels and how their population compares with red squirrels. But I got into the office the other day to an email asking whether I believed that 20,000 elephants had been killed in Africa in 2012. It turns out that it's surprisingly difficult to count elephants, as More or Less found out last October.