OT A slow-moving but interesting video about an orphan elephant placed in the care of someone at a wildlife preserve who was also caring for a herd of cape buffalo. Now 25 years later, the elephant is the leader of the buffalo herd!!!
5 minutes might be enough to get the idea, but I should tell you that not everything is sweetness and light. The female elephant doesn't like adult male buffaloes and she has killed 15 of them. Sometimes she doesn't like baby buffalo either and for no apparent reasons she gets angry sometimes and she's killed iirc 6 of them.The humans now keep the adult males separate, and when it's mating time they chain up the elephant. She could easaily break her chains but she doesn't. When the females give birth they do so away from the herd, but usually come right back within a day or two of delivery. But the two in the video have already lost one calf to the elephant and they've learned, and their knowledge overrudes their "instinct" so they've waited separately in the bush for 2 1/2 weeks before joining the herd again.
Buffalo live about 15 years and elephants about 65, so none of this herd have ever known life without the elephant.
To learn more about the life and strugges of this unusual social situation, watch