Nature is a force to be reckoned with and it’s definitely one that you can’t fight against.
In a Facebook post by 50-year-old German photographer Jens Cullmann, the will of nature is strong and it clearly shows us how the food web goes.
The series of photos depicts a mother elephant and her baby elephant stuck in the mud. As they were unable to move, a group of hyenas started to stalk the pair and by the next day, they had already torn apart the baby elephant which was next to its mother.
The photographer first found the pair when he spotted two trunks protruding out from the ground and a bunch of hyenas stalking them at the Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. The next morning when he returned, he saw that the baby elephant had already been mauled and that there were vultures picking at the corpse.
Mr Cullmann said,
“It’s the worst thing that can happen to a mother. Both you and your baby get stuck in the mud and she couldn’t help because her trunk was out of reach.
For the mother to see and hear the noises at night as the hyenas kill her baby – I imagine that was actually very upsetting.”
The mother elephant tried her best to throw mud on them using her trunk but they continued to pick on her dead baby.
In the end, the adult elephant slowly died of starvation and dehydration during a rescue attempt.
When the series of photos were posted online, Mr Cullmann received a lot of hate messages from people saying that he could have saved the pair from their deaths but this is what he had to say in response to that.
“You don’t know the conditions there. You don’t know how it is to dig an elephant out of the mud alone. It’s not possible. It’s definitely not possible.
If you break it down, it’s nature and this happens. It’s survival of the fittest.”
This is definitely a very big wake up call that nature always has the upper hand and in recent years, we humans have wreaked havoc to the ecosystem causing global warming. In a way, the global warming caused by us resulted in the drought in the Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. So, it is high time that we changed our ways of living into ones that are more sustainable for the sake of our futures.
Also read: Elephants Walk 12 Hours Every Year To Pay Respect To Human Friend Who Passed Away 7 Years Ago
