The Heartwarming Story of An Elephant That Fought a Crocodile to Save Her Baby

The attack on an elephant calf

Like the best internet videos, this one wastes no time getting to the good stuff. At the beginning of the video, we can see the crocodile snapping at a baby elephant. And before too long, the crocodile makes its attack!

The attack is pretty brutal to watch, even if you know ahead of time that this video has a happy ending. The crocodile gets the baby elephant’s trunk in its mouth, and this makes the stakes of their fight much higher. If the crocodile was successful in biting the elephant’s trunk off, then the mutilated calf would very likely die.

Fortunately for the calf, his mother soon came to the rescue. But to understand more about this insane rumble in the jungle, it’s important to understand why the calf was attacked in the first place.

Mother elephant rescues baby elephant from the jaws of a crocodile. Elephants are Just Incredible 🐘

Credits – in the Video pic.twitter.com/Hf20e5WKau
— Supriya Sahu IAS (@supriyasahuias) July 30, 2022

Why the calf was attacked

We’re willing to bet that you haven’t heard too many stories about elephants getting attacked by crocodiles. So, why did the calf get attacked? It mostly comes down to two factors: the size and the age of the baby elephant.

Firstly, if the baby elephant wasn’t relatively small, the crocodile would likely not have made an attack. Crocodiles may be ambitious, but they know enough to follow the classic advice and never bite off more than they can chew.

Second, since the calf is so young, it had no way of knowing what danger it was in until it was too late. In this lush African jungle, the young animal didn’t have a care in the world as he hung out in the shallow end of a watering hole. While older elephants know more about the potential risks lurking beneath the water, this calf didn’t find out about the dangers of the crocodile until it was nearly too late.

Powerful maternal instincts

If the video had ended with the crocodile making its ruthless attack on the elephant calf, it would have been tragic. Fortunately, what happened next turned potential tragedy into a moment that was downright inspirational.

Previously, the mother elephant had been walking ahead, attempting to guide her young to its destinations. She eventually turned and saw that her child was about to get killed by a crocodile. This is when her maternal instincts kicked in, and she reacted in a way that only an angry mother can!

She immediately bolts in to save her baby from this unexpected attack. And while it’s not entirely clear from the original video, it looks like she follows things up quickly in an attempt to kill the crocodile that dared to attack her calf.

The rest of the herd joins in

As the video shows us, elephants tend to travel in herds. That means more than just the elephant calf and his mother were present during the attack. How, then, did the rest of the herd react to this unexpected danger?

When you first watch the video, it may look like the other elephants aren’t really doing much. Like, they engage in a fair amount of snorting and other noise, but they don’t help out the endangered calf, leaving that instead as a job for the mama elephant.

In their own way, though, the herd was doing more than just providing moral support. All of that noise coming from a large group of elephants may have been made in an attempt to intimidate the attacking crocodile. And speaking of crocs, if there were any others lurking nearby, this fierce display from the other elephants may have been enough to keep them away.

Killer photos capture this incredible scene

While the video of this fight between the elephant and crocodile is really compelling, it doesn’t really let us see what happened up close. Fortunately, we have awesome photos of everything that went down thanks to the work of Fraпcois Bormaп.

Borman is a farmer and likes to dabble in photography. On that fateful day, he was hoping to find something cool to photograph in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley. And he lucked out: this scene of nature versus nature was one-of-a-kind, and his powerful photos helped capture this moment so the rest of us can see how breathtaking these events truly were.