A forest department official who rushed a baby elephant to its mother by carrying it on his shoulders is the new star on social media.
It’s usual for man to ride an elephant, but it’s unheard of the other way. The photo of the forest official carrying the elephant calf immediately caught eyeballs and went viral on social media.
The one-month-old calf got stuck in mud after it fell into a canal at Nellimala at Ooty’s Mettupalayam range.
Officials from the Mettupalayam forest extricated the calf by toiling hard, but unknowingly separated it from its mother which was waiting nearby. The photo was of their efforts to reunite the baby with its mother.
The road from the Vanabhadra Kaliamman temple in Mettupalayam to Thekkampatti has reserve forests on one side and the Bhavani River on the other.
It all started on Tuesday. A local man on a tractor found a cow elephant stayed put on the road. The driver raced the sound of the tractor expecting the animal to move away, but it instead tried to attack the tractor.
Forest officials who reached the spot chased the elephant and its herd back to the forest by bursting crackers. That was when they heard the cries of the baby elephant trapped in the canal and realized that the elephant on the road was its mother waiting for her calf.
The forest department team rescued the calf and immediately took it to the herd with one of the officials carrying it on his shoulders.
The elephant herd was in the Nellithurai area. But the calf returned to the officials every time they tried to push it towards the group.
They waited for two days, feeding the calf Lactogen, glucose and coconut water in between.
Finally, the mother approached its calf on Thursday evening. The forest department team returned satisfied as the elephant took the calf back to the herd.
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