Forget the mainstream love stories – whether Cameron Diaz has married Benji Madden, or Kim and Kanye are truly happy, or Ashton and Mila are having fun as moonstruck new parents. Real emotion can only come from a situation in which someone breaks into a zoo to be with the one they love.
By someone, we’re referring to an elephant.
Earlier this week, The Dodo reports that a zoo went on lockdown after a male elephant broke out of his... room? Pen? Cell? Zoo-studio-flat...? to find the female his heart belongs to. Then they made sweet trunky love.
But the twist, and the true love part, comes from its forbiddon elements –- he’s a wild elephant kept in the Chandaka Elephant Sanctuary, and she’s a captive female confined to the neighbouring zoo. But that wasn’t enough to keep them apart.
Apparently, he’d spied her a number of times and decided that she was the one for him despite the zoo and the sanctuary’s best efforts to shoo him away once he’d broken down a barrier and made a beeline for the object of his affection. The couple then started mating almost immediately, in stark defiance of those wishing to keep them apart. Although we prefer the term ‘making sweet trunky love’, of course.
Using firecrackers to drive him back, he reportedly continued to linger and moon a bit (as in moon over his love, not drop his pants – elephants don’t wear trousers), but has now been safely returned to the sanctuary, while she has remained in the zoo.
‘We launched an operation to drive out the elephant from the safari and managed to do so in two and half hours,’ Jayant Dash, the zoo’s deputy director, told Odisha Sun Times. ‘During the operation, we took utmost care that other captive elephants were not hurt by the wild elephant.’
Nothing was hurt but his pride, and local media are reporting that this is the first time a wild elephant has broken into a zoo to mate with a captive one. A true love story for our time.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.