African elephants in a savanna-like environment with sparse vegetation, likely late summer or early fall. 4:19
HERD Elephant Orphanage South Africa channel icon HERD Elephant Orphanage South AfricaOriginal creator 77K views Save

Mud for the elephants, milk for the baby

Mud is the main event on this warm afternoon at the HERD elephant orphanage in South Africa, and nearly everyone wants in. more

Somopane, the big bull, is right in the middle of it, his tusks catching the sun, with Lundi and Klaserie splashing around him. Mambo, Kumbura and Jabulani join in too. Trunks fling mud, bodies roll, and before long most of them look dipped in chocolate.

African elephants in a savanna-like environment with sparse vegetation, likely late summer or early fall. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Mud is the main event on this warm afternoon at the HERD elephant orphanage in South Africa, and nearly everyone wants in.

Tokwe, the matriarch, is there as well, looking, as one fan put it, content just to watch her family play. Bubi takes a pass. A couple of followers noticed she keeps herself clean this time, and one decided she is too posh to get dirty.

Little Khanyisa has her mind on something else, which is milk. Carer Reply brings the bottles, and she picks each one up with her own trunk and feeds herself. Her followers keep saying how grown up she looks doing it on her own.

A young elephant holds a bottle with her trunk and drinks from it on dry, grassy ground. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
While the herd plays in the mud, Khanyisa picks up her milk bottle with her trunk.

She drains each bottle fast, and she knows to tip her head back at the end for the very last drop. One longtime follower admits to dreading the day the bottles stop, because their girl isn't really a baby anymore.

The whole muddy afternoon was filmed by carer Godknows. A fan raised the obvious question of how much of that mud ended up on the carers, since with all that splashing and slinging, somebody must have been pelted. Another summed it up best as a marvelous muddy mess of modern mammoths.

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