The African elephant is a highly sociable animal, whose strict matriarchal hierarchy puts the care and protection of its young at top priority.
But as these amazing pictures show, sometimes even in this most maternal of species, things can go terribly wrong. Those who watched the drama insist it was a brutal attack by a mother on her newborn infant. Yet it is not clear whether this was the truth.
These pictures illustrate what happened at the Friedrichsfelde Animal Park in Berlin last weekend. Visitors were horrified as a newborn baby elephant was seemingly saved from certain death by keepers, after his stressed-out mother appeared to crush and then drown him.
Staff at the park were caught off-guard by the speed with which the African elephant Pori, 26, gave birth to her 250lb baby - and then, in the moments afterwards, seemed intent on killing him.
Pori - who crushed her first baby to death at the park in 2005 in a tragic accident - seemed to stomp on her newborn calf.
We cannot know what the elephant was thinking, but with the previous fatality in mind, staff at the animal park were concerned she was trying to kill him.
It certainly looked that way to the hundreds of onlookers, many of them children, who burst into tears as baby Dumbo was tossed like a helpless ragdoll.
Then, suddenly, Pori began rolling him through the sand of her enclosure, using all three tons of her weight to move him like he was a beach ball.
Many people at the park screamed as keepers flocked to the enclosure to try to halt the attack. They hurled apples at the animal, tried to tempt her with carrots and cabbages. But she seemed intent on killing her baby
And because there were other elephants in the enclosure, some of them highly aggressive bulls -including the father, Tembo - who were themselves worked up by what was going on, they dared not intervene.
All watched helplessly as Pori rolled her son into the water of the enclosure, which had been designed to resemble a watering hole on the African veldt.
"It was terrible," said Andre Dominkius, who, with his wife Baerbel, witnessed the incident.
"The poor baby was making these squealing noises and had blood pouring out of a wound on one of his eyes.
"When she rolled him in the water, his own instincts must have kicked in, because he stuck his trunk above the surface as a snorkel to try to breathe."
But, thankfully, there was a happy ending to this sickening drama. Keepers eventually managed to lure Pori away with a selection of bread and apples.
That was the cue for staff and bystanders to pull the shocked baby out of the water by his trunk.
He was prescribed a tranquilliser and, after being given a clean bill of health, was reunited with his mother on Monday night - although a guard was posted in the elephant house to make sure that her demons didn't return.
Heather Sohl, a mammals expert at the WWF, said: "There is some evidence of this happening after elephants are relocated, and it has been known for male elephants to kill a calf."
She said it was possible the highly artificial environment of the zoo, with no opportunity for Pori to take her place in the elephant matriarchal hierarchy, meant her normal maternal instincts went astray. Whatever motivated this attack, Pori has calmed down now, and mother and baby are doing well.
23rd May 2007 Story Via World News
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