A tourist and his family visited Kruger National Park in June and witnessed an elephant attacking a rhino and her calf. Dr Krishna Tummalapalli captured the footage below, at Shishangeni Lodge, near the waterhole.
Dr Tummalapalli explained to Latest Sightings, ‘We went to the watering hole and were watching two rhinos drinking water for a bit of time before we spotted two elephants approaching from the distance. We were curious about what was about to happen but we never expected them to get into a fight.’
‘We were amazed that we could see something like the elephant become aggressive towards the rhinos. We were also worried for the baby rhino, especially after the elephant pushed the rhino mom over her own baby! We felt a bit more at ease once the rhinos started running away with seemingly no injury. Who knew that an elephant carries such power? As Indian Americans, we were used to Indian elephants which are not as big as African elephants. We think of rhinos as huge animals, but the elephant literally pushed the rhino around like it was nothing!’
‘After the rhinos managed to escape some serious injury, the elephant started facing us and moving in our direction. I don’t know whether it would have attacked us, but we put some more distance between the safari vehicle and the aggressive elephant before we could find out. We spoke to our guide and he said that in the 10 years he had been working as a guide, he has never seen anything like this. We witnessed a lot of great sightings on our trip to the Park, but nothing could match this experience.’
He concluded by advising foreign tourists from other continents to ‘do as much safari as possible, because when you get back home, you’ll definitely miss being able to see these incredible animals out in the wild every day.’
