C’sar, a 38-year-old bull elephant living in North Carolina, could become the first pachyderm to wear contact lenses. Because nothing looks nerdier than an elephant in glasses.
“An elephant has never been fitted with corrective lenses,” the Associated Press reports. (One elephant once had a contact put in his eye, but it was just to keep some gunk in, not to help his vision.) To give you a sense of the scale here, C’sar weighs 12,000 pounds and has eyes about the same size as a horse’s. His contacts would need to be 1.5 inches in diameter — about three times the size of the ones humans stick in their eyes. They would need to be changed every three months. And given how hard it is to convince people to stick pieces of plastic in their eyes, we do not envy the person who has the job of sticking their fingers in a six-ton elephant’s eye, even if he is sedated.
C’sar needs these little plastic pieces of magic to correct for farsightedness. His caretakers started worrying about him after he lost 1,000 pounds and started moping around, depressed. It turned out he had eye problems and needed surgery to remove cataracts. Since the surgery, he’s been doing better — gaining weight and looking a little less glum. Contacts could make him feel more like himself, but we hear that he’s also considered ordering some chunky glasses from Warby Parker.
