This July 3rd event was announced by George Shea of Nathan's 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, so I guess this is indeed the night when Nathan's will be one of the fireworks sponsors.....



The rules are simple. Whichever team eats more standard-issue frankfurter rolls in six minutes will be declared victorious. Individual honors will be dispensed on the single creature that stomachs the most starchy carbohydrates.

The odds are clearly in the elephants’ favor.

According to circus handlers, the beasts gorge on 200 pounds of food a day and can devour a loaf of bread, a staple of their diet, in one and a half seconds.

more @ http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/24/32_24_mm_elephant.html

anyone know what time to be there and the exact location??

thanks!

it's at 11 am...mid morning snack time for elephants


FIRST-EVER CROSS-SPECIES EATING COMPETITION
6/25/2009

A fully sanctioned cross-species eating contest will occur at 11 AM on Friday, July 3, between Major League Eating and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey® presents THE CONEY ISLAND BOOM A RING, in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

The event, a six-minute hot dog bun-eating competition, held in cooperation with Nathan’s Famous, will feature three Ringling Bros.® Asian elephants and three Major League Eaters. The human eaters will compete the next day in the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest, a holiday tradition that attracts worldwide attention.

The elephants -- Bunny, 42, Susie, 46, and Minnie, 48 – will compete against Juliet Lee, 43, Gravy Brown, 30, and Patrick Bertoletti, 24. Collectively, the elephants weigh approximately 9 tons while the humans weigh just shy of 500 pounds.

“This contest has significant implications for inter-species relations,” said George Shea, Chairman of Major League Eating “If the humans win it shows we are unbeatable in this sport, and if the elephants win it will significantly enhance their stature in the animal kingdom.”

“Eating approximately 150-200 pounds fruits, vegetables, hay, grain and bread daily is average for meeting an elephant’s nutritional needs,” said Janice Aria, Director of Animal Stewardship, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. “Asian elephants enjoy eating bread and they can typically eat a foot long loaf of bread in 1.6 seconds. Ringling Bros. has strong confidence that the elephants participating in this first-time event will be victorious.”

Shea said the humans might be able to use their speed-eating technique like dunking, a process of using water to compact bread, to their advantage. Aria countered that elephants, the largest land mammal in the world have their own true advantage, with more than 150,000 muscles and tendons in their trunk, the elephants can scoop up large quantities of hot dog buns at a time.

Juliet Lee, a 105-pound mother of two from Germantown, Maryland, who consumed 13.23 pounds of cranberry sauce in eight minutes to secure the world cranberry sauce-eating title, said: “An elephant can eat 200 pounds of food, but that is only three percent of its body weight. I can eat 12.6 percent of my body weight in eight minutes and I do not anticipate any difficulty eating more food than the elephants will in a head-to-head match.”

http://www.ifoce.com/news.php?action=detail&sn=697

We're heading over at 10. It doesn't say where specifically, so we're going to check Nathan's and then wander towards the circus.

fixconey wrote on Jun 22^nd, 2009, 11:44pm:
Not to worry, they are giving the elephant a 25,000mg Nexium, the animal shouldn't suffer heatburn or acid reflux!  

The thing was hillarious!  The elephants were quite meticulous, even retrieving single dropped buns off the ground before returning to the big pile.   The mammoth gastronomes even enjoyed a few bananas in between hot dog rolls.  I videotaped the entire event and will post it probably Sunday, once it's digitized and edited. (old school 8mm videocasette, waddaya gonna do?)

what fun!