Orphaned Baby Elephants “You Can’t Help But Fall In Love With” | National Geographic

I wanted to go to Kenya to relax a bit with elephants, to see the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust orphaned elephants. Now that's bittersweet in itself. These are baby elephants, which you can't help but fall in love with. [Music]

Look at these guys! How could you harm these guys? To spend time with these baby elephants is just, it recharges your soul. Just to have them lead me into a group of wild elephants and to be chaperoned, they are protecting me. Whether they know it or not, they are protecting me as I go into this group of wild elephants.

Elephants in the wild, if you don't understand them, can be extremely dangerous. These baby elephants walk me into this herd of bulls, and I feel safe. I can walk around their mud baths. These babies, they've been released into the wild, and they go back and forth. They’re sort of a transition group now between the fully wild and those that are still being hand raised.

They introduced me to these bull elephants that, were I to walk up to it like this on my own, chances are very good I'd be seriously injured. I'm just a few feet away from them. It's okay! That's an extraordinary opportunity. It recharges me, but it just reestablishes my belief that these animals live in a society we barely understand.

I don't have any greater right or lesser right to be on this planet, to have my community, than these elephants. [Music]