The Hilarious Elephants at Mokolodi

After our cheetah experience at Mokolodi, we thought we were pretty much done for the day and were heading out of the park when we noticed an elephant walking toward us. Our ranger stopped the truck while 4 elephants came in to the clearing just next to the road. These elephants were with their handlers who teach them commands in Urdu and Hindi. They have one male elephant and 3 females. So we sat there right next to these giants and watched them for about 20 minutes. You should know that elephants that close smell really bad. And elephant poop has a worse smell than you would think.

One of the females came right beside our truck and starting eating the plant stuff growing very low to the ground. The male turned around to see what she was doing and used his trunk to pull the stuff right out of her mouth (see picture on right). Evidently, he decided that was kind of tasty so he started working on pulling up some of the stuff himself.

Now this stuff is so low to the ground that it's out of their line of sight and it's rooted very tightly in the ground. They wrapped their trunks around it and then used their feet to help get it out of the ground (see photos below). The male got a nice big serving and the female pulled it out of his mouth with her trunk. When the male's trunk started "nosing" around her mouth she pulled the plants out of her mouth with her trunk and held it away until he went to back to uprooting more of the stuff for himself. We were highly entertained for several minutes by this interaction.

As an editorial aside, we were quite impressed by how agile the elephants were. They're huge but they can do some very delicate work. Kristen and Debra also found out why elephants have 4 feet (It's a joke that was demonstrated by the male elephant while we were there).

After the elephants decided they were done entertaining us, we finished our Mokolodi adventure and headed home.