Written by Stephen Messenger
All too often, along the blurry borders of civilization and the natural world, it can seem our presence must come at the detriment to local wildlife. But while there are indeed some people callused to empathy, there are still many more happy to prove that it’s a human instinct to be humane.
Earlier this week, a baby female elephant fell and became stuck in a muddy ditch while trailing her family in the Assam region of northern India. After hearing cries from the distressed animal, and noticing that its mother was unable to help, dozens of villagers nearby hurried to its rescue.
While it’s safe to say that the kindhearted locals were driven by empathy and compassion, thankfully a video has emerged to ensure that their show of altruism doesn’t go unnoticed by the world.
“All of the villagers came together to pull this elephant calf out of the ditch,” says one of the rescuers. “She was in bad condition and we could not bare the site of a baby dying in that ditch, and that’s why we rushed to pull her from the ditch.”
After the baby elephant was successfully pulled from the mud using ropes, village then helped to hoist the injured animal onto a truck to be transferred to a nearby wildlife rehabilitation center in the Kaziranga National Park.
Considering that a handful of poachers can make headlines for the damage the deaths they cause, it’s only fitting that the greater goodness of an entire village to save a life should not pass without applause.
This post was originally published by TreeHugger.
Hiranmay Karlekar