Abelian Girth and Girth

We show that the abelian girth of a graph is at least three times its girth. We prove an analogue of the Moore bound for the abelian girth of regular graphs, where the degree of the graph is fixed and the number of vertices is large. We conclude that one could try to improve the Moore bound for graphs of fixed degree and many vertices by trying to improve its analogue concerning the abelian girth.