A video of two adult elephants working together to save a calf from drowning has gone viral. The incident happened at the Grand Park Zoo in Seoul, South Korea.
As you can see in the video, one adult elephant appears to be playing with the calf near the side of a pool. The calf then falls into the pool and appears to be struggling to stay afloat. Within seconds, another adult elephant on the other side of the pool rushes over to help save the calf. Both adults seem to realize that they won’t be able to pull the calf to safety from the side of the pool, so they enter the pool together from a different side.
The adult elephants rush over to the calf and both use their trunks to try to lift the little one out. When that doesn’t work, the adult elephants appear to escort the baby to the end of the pool where they can all walk out. The three exit the pool together and the baby calf appears to be fine.
The footage was captured by a camera set up near the zoo’s elephant enclosure. It was posted online on Friday and had garnered nearly 500,000 views, according to The Sun.
Over the past decade, researchers have learned that elephants are incredibly smart animals. According to Scientific American, observations have shown that elephants are some of the “most intelligent animals on the planet.”
“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.”