This is SO awesome. The adult elephants worked together to save the baby, and you could really see that they were panicked. These animals are so intelligent. I love elephants! I have elephant earrings too!
This is fecken awesome! I have always loved elephants and this is yet another reason for everyone else to love them too. Simply wow! Now imagine if it had been humans instead. They would have probably picked up their smartphones to record the drowing child instead of helping tne mother to save it. In fact, chances are high even the mother/father would pick up their camer-phone too.
Realistically, that's the same demographic that puts everything on worldstarhiphop. Regardless, neat video ChrisL.
What amazes me is the one on the far side IMMEDIATELY spun and quickly came to help. These are truly amazing and beautiful creatures.
Elephants can swim! The baby elephant was swimming in the deep end and breathing through it's trunk like a snorkel which is how all elephants swim. However it was probably upset because it was in deep water alone and that was why the adults went in to help it find it's way out. Elephants are smart and capable creatures and very family orientated. If one is in distress they will go to their aid.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...ants-are-even-smarter-than-we-realized-video/ One day in 2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe and honeydew. Stretching out his trunk, he managed to get the fruit and break off a piece of the branch, but the rest of the tasty leaves remained tantalizingly out of reach. Without hesitation he marched straight to a large plastic cube in the yard, rolled it just beneath the hovering bamboo and used it as a step stool to pull the whole branch to the ground. Seven-year-old Kandula had never before interacted with a cube in this manner. Determined to satisfy his stomach and his curiosity, he did something scientists did not know elephants could do: he had an aha moment. A couple weeks earlier a team of researchers led by Diana Reiss and Preston Foerder, then at City University New York, had visited Kandula’s home at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. They placed sticks and sturdy cubes around the yard and strung a kind of pulley system similar to a laundry line between the roof of the elephant house and a tree. From the cable they dangled fruit-tipped bamboo branches of various lengths both within and without of Kandula’s reach. After preparing the aerial snacks they retreated out of sight, turned on a camera and waited to see what the young elephant would do. It took several days for Kandula to achieve his initial insight, but after that he repeatedly positioned and stood on the cube to wrap his trunk around food wherever the scientists suspended it; he learned to do the same with a tractor tire; and he even figured out how to stack giant butcher blocks to extend his reach. Other elephants had failed similar tests in the past. As it turns out, however, those earlier studies were not so much a failure of the elephant mind as the human one. Unlike people and chimpanzees, elephants rely far more on their exquisite senses of smell and touch than on their relatively poor vision, especially when it comes to food. Previously, researchers had offered elephants only sticks as potential tools to reach dangling or distant treats—a strategy at which chimps excel. But picking up a stick blunts an elephant’s sense of smell and prevents the animal from feeling and manipulating the desired morsel with the tip of its dexterous trunk. Asking an elephant to reach for a piece of food with a stick is like asking a blindfolded man to locate and open a door with his ear. “We are always looking at animals through our human lens—it’s hard not to,” Reiss says. “But now we have an increased appreciation of diverse thinking creatures all around us because of so much research on so many species. It’s fascinating to try and find ways of testing animal minds so they can show us what they are really capable of.” People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully catalogued astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving. Because of recent experiments designed with the elephant’s perspective in mind, scientists now have solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a sense of self. Despite the sharpened awareness of elephant sentience, many zoos around the world continue to maintain or expand their elephant exhibits and increasing numbers of heavily armed poachers are descending on Africa to meet the soaring demand for ivory, killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year. The U.S. recently banned ivory trade, with some exceptions, but there have been no steps toward outlawing elephant captivity. At least a few zoos are using the latest science to transform their elephant enclosures, giving the animals more room to roam as well as intellectually stimulating puzzles. Only some zoos can afford to make such changes, however, and many elephant experts maintain that, given everything we know about the creatures’ mental lives, continuing to keep any of them locked up is inexcusable.
Elephants are highly intelligent and we are far from learning everything there is to know about them. And that says more about our own limitations than the limitations of elephants. What the OP posted #9 above reminded me of a documentary that I seen about an African badger called Stoeffel who became am escape artist outwitting all kinds of ingenious methods to keep him contained. He even broke INTO a lion's enclosure just to mess with them. The 2nd time they taught him a lesson. We underestimate the intelligence of animals to our own detriment.
I was just thinking that some people actually throw their children into the water to try to teach them to swim! That is never a good idea though because the child can panic, and once you start panicking is when your chances of drowning increase immensely.
Yeah, friggen sadists! That is how most people of the previous generations learned how to swim, but it is less acceptable today. Has anyone even used this "technique" since, like, 1971?
Yes, I had a neighbor who was that kind of guy. Lol. The same guy (when I told him his son had gum in his mouth as he was telling his son to do dives into the pool and flips), who said he could just perform a tracheotomy on him if he started choking. A real dumb ass.
Yeah, instead of just telling him to take the gum out of his mouth, he would rather just let him have his gum and perform a tracheotomy on him if he started choking. I feel sorry for his kids, and I'm glad he wasn't my father. Lol.
Maybe he just liked living on the wild side. I don't know the man, so I'll be careful with statements like the latter, but judging from this specific incident he sure seems to be a little cray-cray. Wonder if an elephant would tell her child to chew his food before playtime.
