You can count yourself pretty lucky to witness a rhino and a calf drinking at a Kruger National Park waterhole, like 64-year-old tourist Krishna Tummalapalli did, but then things escalated in a big way.
Tummalapalli was staying at the Shishangeni Lodge in early June of this year, and was enjoying a game drive with his family when they came across the two rhinos.
At this point, they watched two elephants approaching from a distance. Here’s Kruger Sightings with Tummalapalli recounting what happened next:
We were curious about what was about to happen but we never expected them to get into a fight.
We were amazed that we could see something like the elephant become aggressive towards the rhinos. We were also worried for the baby rhino, especially after the elephant pushed the rhino mom over her own baby! We felt a bit more at ease once the rhinos started running away with seemingly no injury. Who knew that an elephant carries such power? As Indian Americans, we were used to Indian elephants which are not as big as African elephants. We think of rhinos as huge animals, but the elephant literally pushed the rhino around like it was nothing!
After the rhinos managed to escape some serious injury, the elephant started facing us and moving in our direction. 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. We spoke to our guide and he said that in the 10 years he had been working as a guide, he has never seen anything like this.
Thankfully, he managed to catch it all on video:
Sheesh, hectic. There is only one winner in that battle.
To reiterate, it appears that both rhinos emerged unscathed, although they may be giving elephants a wider berth for some time.
[source:krugersightings]
