The Chai Lai OrchidYou never hear ill of baby elephants, do you? You don’t of adult elephants either but the young ones really avoid bad press.
A few days ago, a colleague was showing me some pictures from her holiday to Kenya, including one snap of an extremely hung baby elephant, and I won’t lie, it jarred me a little. Never wanna see anything of the sort ever again.
That aside, my view of the young animals is clean-cut, joyous and thoroughly enjoyable. Wait, that sounds like I shag elephants. I don’t. They’re just cute. Whatever.
Here’s some wholesome footage of one in Chiang Mai, Thailand:
The video was filmed by Andrew Malcolm and shows the calf galavanting around falling on tourists much to their amusement.
He wrote:
Baby elephant Suki frolics with travellers and mahouts at an elephant camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Next level travel goals are being met left right and centre for guests of the Chai Lai Orchid, the only Airbnb where you can actually live with elephants. Look no further for meaningful elephant adventures!
Calfs weigh about 250 pounds at birth and stands about three feet tall. Calves can’t see very well at first, but they can recognise their mothers by touch, scent, and sound.
Baby elephants stay very close to their mothers for the first couple of months. The calves drink their mother’s milk for about two years, if not longer. They drink up to 3 gallons of milk per day, which makes me feel sick tbh.
At about four months old, they also begin eating some plants, like grown up elephants, but they continue to need as much milk from their mother. So much so they’ll keep drinking milk for up to ten years.
At first, baby elephants don’t really know what to do with their trunks. They swing them to and fro and sometimes even step on them. They will suck their trunk just as a human baby might suck its thumb.
But this young pup seems quite content kicking a football about and pinning people down on the floor like a fully fledged professional wrester.
Of course not all baby elephants can be lucky enough to hound resort guests, as the distressing footage above displays.
Footage captured by safari-goers in South Africa’s Kruger National Park on September 1 shows an elephant calf without a trunk.
The youngster can be seen walking around with their family, with one adult member nuzzling it with their own impressive trunk.
There is clearly plenty of love for the little elephant, but the challenges it will have to face are already heartbreakingly apparent.
In the footage, a man can be heard saying:
Oh no way. A baby elephant without a trunk?
Poor thing. That is unreal, I have never seen anything like this.
I don’t think it is going to make it. Oh man.
You’ve got to feel for the poor lad. The world is cruel place sometimes.
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