You should try not to anthropomorphize animals too much, applying our laws and behaviors to them isn’t fair, but crocodiles can be such cold-hearted dicks sometimes.
An elephant had a lucky escape from the jaws of a crocodile earlier this week at the Liwonde National Park in Malawi. Alexander Makanga managed to capture the whole battle on video while on a riverboat safari near Mvuu Camp.
The small elephant wanders over to the riverside to get a drink of water. Out of nowhere, a crocodile takes a snap at its trunk and chaos ensues. Turns out, the noise of a herd of elephants confronting a crocodile sounds exactly how you would expect them to.
With a stroke of luck and some help from a larger adult, the elephant manages to make a break for it and escape the tenacious crocodile’s grip.
Weirdly enough, there’s a short story by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So stories that explains how the elephant got its long trunk after a crocodile bit its snout and stretched it in a tug-of-war. Although needless to say, the actual story of how the elephant got its trunk is a few million years older than Kipling’s version.