Someone needed to address the elephant in the room. Mosha, an Asian elephant who lost her right foreleg at just 7 months old when she stepped on a land mine on Thailand's border with Myanmar got her ninth prosthetic limb on June 29, which ended up saving her life. "The way she walked was unbalanced and her spine was going to bend," Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, the orthopedist surgeon who designed the artificial leg, told Reuters. Jivacate made Mosha her first prosthetic leg six years ago when he met her at Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation when the majestic mammal was 2 and a half. Back then, Mosha weighed 1,300 pounds, now she weighs 4,000 and her artificial legs need to be redesigned to keep up with her growing body.

The first elephant to don a prosthetic limb is challenging surgeons to create bigger, better legs. Mosha lost her right foreleg below the knee in a landmine explosion when she was seven months old. Therdchai Jivacate, a surgeon who designs prosthetic legs for humans and other animals, met her in 2007 at the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand. "When I saw Mosha, I noticed that she had to keep raising her trunk into the air in order to walk properly," Jivacate told Motherboard. He built a prosthetic leg for Mosha that relieved the strain she had been putting on her limbs and spine.