When Elephants Attack - Can We Hire This Big Fella? (Didactic Diversion) [**UPDATED**]
By Skanderbeg Posted in Archived — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Your humble correspondent was in South Africa for a few days last week.
Last Friday, this photo was all over the front pages of all the newspapers:
The questions that accompanied it were, "Does anyone know if this is real? Or is this photoshopped?"
Well, apparently it is real:
Elephant accosts Swiss tourists driving through South African game park
Cool. Any elephant who takes sport in terrifying European tourists tooling around in a tiny little car is my kind of elephant.
So, here's a suggestion. Can the RNC or what-not hire on this big fella as a consultant and enforcer? He certainly would provide a badly needed dose of pachydermal esprit de corps....
UPDATE!!!!
This just in via personal contact from South Africa. It turns out that someone happened to have one of those "remote sensing" parabolic microphones pointed at the car at that very moment. Via editing, here's what the occupants had to say:
:-)
(Thanks to "Joliphant" (!!) for hosting the photo....)
Well, there are some other possibilities for why the big pach is having at that little car....
o It's actually a she-elephant, and she's asking the question, "Does this car make me look fat?"
o The big fella figured out that they were SWISS, and this activated some unpleasant pachydermal collective memories involving "Hannibal" and "Alps."
The waterfall picture is an all-time favorite of mine. Wonderful to see it again.
STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SCALIA, J., joined.
It has a happy ending, you get to watch Elizabeth Taylor, and the (liberal) plantation gets its just deserts in the end!
Strong, intelligent, attractive, clean, thrifty...
Hmm. I'd re-think the clean part of that.
Three or four years back, someone came up with the novel idea of decamping a few days of meetings from Pretoria over to Kruger National Park - mainly for the benefit of us international visitors. This seemed interesting, but a major headache was the thusly-induced need to stuff myself with a daily anti-malarial every morning before, during, and after the trip (thank you, Rachel Carson).
In any case, we got to Kruger late on Saturday, and later that evening a tremendous, drenching, loud thunderstorm came up - it was a boomer that would have frightened even the most hardened Oklahoman. But one of the Pretorians noted that this was a great stroke of luck, and he'd explain why when we went out critter-observing on Sunday morning.
He was right. Basically, the heavy Saturday night rain meant that all the large critters were bathed and sparkling clean on Sunday morning. Honestly, the elephants were so clean that they looked like they had just received a fresh coat of paint at the Newport News shipyard.
We were told that we were very lucky to see them like that, since they're usually covered with mud. That's actually by intent. They cover themselves with mud as the only defense they have against ticks and other parasites - the ticks can't get through a mud layer, and if any have gotten themselves attached, they get buried in fresh mud and suffocate.
You could see that during the day - the elephants were going over to mud holes, snorting mud up their trunks, then bending their trunks back over their heads and spraying mud on themselves. By a couple days later, they were completely caked in dried brown mud again.
As I said above, that may be what provoked him.
The big fella heard them speaking Swiss, and he put that together with "Alps," and then with "Hannibal" - and that was enough to make him snap....
Unfair. Unbalanced. Unmedicated. -- IMAO
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