Baby elephant shoves entire face into the mud

Driving around in the bush while on a safari in Africa, you get to experience the wonders, sounds and beauty of a unique natural world. Encountering wild animals in their natural habitat always delivers a fascinating and unique experience. The African Elephant is a huge favorite among tourists. While elephants are the largest land mammals on this planet, they are also among the most intelligent. Elephants are mostly very entertaining to watch and amazingly, humans can relate with so many of their fascinating and amusing behaviors.

During a recent safari in Kruger National Park, we stopped to watch a small herd of elephant busy enjoying a mud bath. Spending time in a mud bath is the favorite pass time activity of any elephant, young and old. Not only does the mud cool elephants down during hot days, it also serves as a very important and healthy scrub, getting rid of itchy ticks and parasites stuck to their skins. Our attention was quickly moved to a young male elephant standing in the mud. To our amusement, this young male elephant decided that today he was going to shove his whole face into the mud.

The young elephant was leaning forward, before he suddenly planted his face straight into the mud. Looking very awkward, the young elephant had his bum in the air while using his back legs to push forward, shoving his face even deeper into the mud. The young male shoved his face up to above eye level. The young elephant stayed in that odd-looking position for a few seconds before lifting his face out of the mud, looking like it was having a royal time.

This young male elephant was very adamant to get his whole face covered with mud, clearly indicating that pretty much his whole face was itchy and he had to get rid of his itchy face quickly. This behavior put a smile on everyone’s face, while relating to the times when we as humans also have those days when we just feel like sticking our own faces into the mud, just for very different reasons than that of the young male elephant.