The Green Elefant

Every year, the green elephant promotes a stand that sells strawberries and asparagus. And every year I wonder why they use that giant green elephant.
I spotted it on my way to the train station with Renfrebar. He needed almost12 hours for 500km to Innsbruck, caused by cancelled trains, broken points, signal interference, failure of the air conditioning system etc. What's wrong with the German public transportation?