For elephants, securing the prime spot at a watering hole is a pretty big deal. The hefty herbivores won’t hesitate to throw their weight around if anything gets in their way on route to the water.
Tourist Krishna Tummalapalli was on safari with his family in South Africa’s Kruger National Park earlier this year where he was able to film an astonishing interaction between a thirsty elephant and a bold rhino that (perhaps foolishly) tried to defend its position at a drinking hole.
The rhino – seemingly startled by the sudden appearance of an elephant directly behind it – turned to face the interloper before charging towards it. For a brief moment, the two grey giants faced off staring each other down in a cloud of dust until the rhino realised it was outmatched and turned tail. As it did so the elephant lunged forward pushing the rhino with its trunk and tusks, pushing its much-smaller rival into the muddy shallows where it almost trampled its own calf.
Tummalapalli and his family were shaken up by the unexpected scuffle, but “felt a bit more at ease once the rhinos started running away with seemingly no injur[ies].”
Satisfied that the rhinos were no longer a problem, the elephant turned its attention on the human spectators. “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,” explains Tummalapalli.