by Matthew Cobb
A team from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya try to help an elephant calf out of a well. The calf was eight months old, its mother is called Zombe. First the team had to get mum out of the way…
All’s well that ends well
October 19, 2012 • 7:17 am
HUZZAH!
You could title this “All’s well that ends well.”
SPOILERS!
well given I’d forgotten to give it a title – I have stolen yours!
That was wonderful!
I wonder how much the elephants realized the humans were helping out.
Not at all from mum’s reaction at the end. An awful lot of aggressive orientation towards the jeeps it seemed to me.
It certainly would be nice to think that in the end mom understood the intent. Like Jerry though I suspect that she sees the whole event more as a lucky escape from the evil humans.
Mike.
Given human’s track record with elephants, in spite of our sentimental desires, it’s probably overall a good thing they don’t learn to trust humans.
And of course the greatest acts of charity are those performed for their own sake alone, with no need of reward (in this case not even the gratitude of the mother). This is why humanist and atheist morality is greater than Christian morality, which is always hopeful of deferred infinite reward.
Loved the reunion…made me teary!
Is the well a sinkhole formation or is it man-made? How often do baby elephants fall into wells?
I love elephants, and that little one can certainly run!
My wife got to feed “Danny” a 21 year old bull orphan in Zambia – http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alison.dunbar/southafrica2006/pages/PICT0095.html and http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alison.dunbar/southafrica2006/pages/PICT0099-1.html.
We were also charged by a bull which was on an island in the middle of the Zambezi – http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alison.dunbar/southafrica2006/pages/PICT0049.html I remember watching my wife taking pictures and trying to reverse out of the boat we were in as the bull raced towards us. She was repeating “Shit, shit shit! We’re going to die! We’re going to die!” over and over again, while still taking pictures!
We met a small orphan as well – http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alison.dunbar/southafrica2006/pages/PICT0103.html.
Cheers,
Norm.
To me, this was, finally, not watchable.
I can imagine that African soil is amazingly rock hard, such as we have with clay soils in California. Nonetheless, instead of the dithering effort with a rope, how about using a pickaxe, and shovel, and cutting a 50-cm-wide path out of the “well”? Mebbe you have to keep splashing the hard-pan soil with water to soften it, but by digging a narrow trench and a way out, you save yourself from a repeat effort, which “never in a million years” would happen again…except, probably a week later, the same calf will be in the same hole! And a hole with the same steep sides and no way out.
The wells are used by local herders to water their animals. That’s one of the issues associated with the conservation of many animals, especially big, dangerous ones. We share a space…
Not to mention the fact that by the time they’d finished digging a 50 cm-wide path through hard-baked soil in sweltering African heat, Mum elephant would probably have been miles away and the newly-liberated baby would have been left to starve or be killed by predators, so rendering the whole exercise pointless.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
…and who says that animals don’t have emotions….
b&
Mammals at least.