Taking a selfie is so old school. Just ask Canadian tourist Christian LeBlanc, who vacationed in Thailand recently. During his trip to an animal sanctuary while feeding a pair of elephants, one of the pachyderms grabbed his handy GoPro camera and took a photo with his human companion. The man uploaded it to Instagram and named it an “ elephant elphie ,” citing a CNN report. Imagine that.
Who knew that today’s largest land animal has a penchant for taking pictures — let alone, an elephant? Certainly, LeBlanc and his companion didn’t. The two visited the Thai island of Koh Phangan two months ago, but their trip of a lifetime is just being picked up by sources, thanks to social media.
Thai elephant snaps ‘ephie’ selfie with Vancouver man’s GoPro http://t.co/GoUpNzmecr pic.twitter.com/MGIKL25cN0
— CBC British Columbia (@cbcnewsbc) May 21, 2015
He shared his story via email of feeding elephants when one decided to showcase its trunk skills and knack for taking the perfect snap. Little did the man know, an elephant elphie was in the making.
“My girlfriend and I were exploring the island when we came across a couple elephants. For 50 cents, you could buy a basket of bananas to feed them, so we decided to get one.
Next thing I knew, it grabbed my GoPro by the mount and I got the selfie of a lifetime, which I can’t take full credit for.”
The lucky tourist said his sports mountable camera was set to automatic. The feature allowed him to take photographs continuously. Because he’s one to look at the glass half-full, he is not dismissing the possibility that the elephant took the, well, elphie due to its high level of intelligence.
“Elephants are incredibly intelligent, and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action. I know nothing about the actual elephant other than its love for selfies. Its personality was very playful and it clearly had a craving for bananas because it devoured them.”
The man has a good point. According to a story in Scientific American , elephants possess high degrees of intelligence, more than previously known.
“People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully cataloged astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving.”
With the elephant elphie taken by a non-human photographer, now the burning question is: who owns the copyright ? Remember the controversy surrounding the monkey selfie?
[Photo by Joern Pollex / Getty Images]
