Elephants will fill you with fear. They are astonishing creatures. The African elephant is the largest living land mammal, larger than its Asian relative - the sheer bulk is astonishing in itself - but there's so much more to this magnificent pachyderm.
One of the greatest privileges of my life was seeing elephants in the wild at Tsavo East National Park in Kenya. We travelled for hours over dusty savannah, arriving at a waterhole in the late afternoon and were rewarded with the breathtaking vision of a herd of elephants, silhouetted against the setting sun.
Elephants are highly intelligent, gregarious and capable of emotions we associate with humans: they even appear to grieve over dead companions. That tear-jerking scene from Dumbo where Dumbo's mother strokes him with her trunk through the bars of her cage was no Disney licence. We stood and watched the herd touching and caressing one another and entwining their trunks. Female elephants, of course, are famously attentive mothers and look after any vulnerable members of their herd and form family groups that span several generations.
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