Baby elephant rescue video: It doesn't get any more heartwarming
Baby elephant rescue: A video of the rescue of a baby elephant in a Kenyan national park tugs at the heartstrings. Wait for the final moments when mother and baby are reunited.
Nairobi, Kenya
How do you pull a baby elephant out of a deep, muddy hole? A rope and a Land Rover. Then the payoff: A frantic baby elephant sprint to mom.
A heartwarming video of the rescue of a baby elephant in a Kenyan national park that lies in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro gained a mass of viewers on Thursday. The video shows the rescuers' potentially dangerous faceoff with the mother elephant and their struggle to get her calf out of a 5-foot (1.5-meter) hole.
Vicki Fishlock of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants faced down the mother with her Land Rover, and made a high-pitched aye-aye-aye call to help drive the mother off. Thirty muddy minutes later, after two men struggle to get a rope around the 8-month-old calf, Fishlock put her SUV in reverse and pulled the animal out.
"Relief! Rescues where family members are around are stressful, and I'm always happy when everyone is safely back in the cars. And I have to admit that the reunions always bring a tear to my eye. The intensity of their affection for each other is one of the things that makes elephants so special," Fishlock said.
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The hole was a man-made well with a foot (.3 meter) of water in it was dug by the Masai tribesmen who live around Amboseli National Park, and the trapped elephant underscores the increasing problem of human-animal conflict. The baby elephant was too small to crawl out on its own and would have died without the help of rescuers. If the elephant dies, it ruins the well, angering the Masai who live nearby.
