Elephant Holds up Cars for Food

It is not quite as dramatic as the title might sound but this little fella was standing in the middle of the Yala National Park approach road - effectively blocking most of the road. He has learned to beg for food from passing traffic - we saw several small trucks pull up and the drivers passing over a banana or two - clearly he'd done this before. By the time we got close he was sort of shuffling back and forth into the shrubbery, all the while keeping an eye on the people in the bus. As you'll see in this very short clip, he was almost touching the vehicle - we saw a couple of other elephants doing the same during the drive into the park. Interestingly the guide reckoned this fella had been shot sometime ago because you can see the circular wounds from shotgun pellets that seems to have healed over nicely. Elephants can flatten an entire field or rice in one night and destroy a lot of crops like maize and fruit so unfortunately, even though it's entirely illegal, farmers still take pot shots at their invaders. Luckily for this guy, he lived to tell the tale.
  Yala Elephant from Robin Nichols on Vimeo.