The rescue of a baby elephant in a Kenyan national park that lies in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro gained a mass of viewers on Thursday. A baby elephant had fallen into a 5 foot hole and rescuers' had a potentially dangerous faceoff with the mother elephant in their struggles to rescue her baby.

Vicki Fishlock of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants had the job to face down the mother with her Land Rover and made a high-pitched aye-aye-aye call to help drive the mother off. Two men then struggled to get a rope around the 8-month-old calf, and 30 minutes later Fishlock put her SUV in reverse and pulled the baby elephant out.

The rescue took place on Oct. 8th. The hole was a man-made well with a foot of water in it that was dug by the Masai tribesmen who lived around Amboseli National Park. It was important to save the baby elephant's life but also to help eliminate the increasing problem of human-animal conflict with the local tribesmen. The baby elephant was too small to crawl out on its own and would have died without the help of rescuers. If the baby had died the well would have been ruined, thus angering the Masai who live nearby.

Acording to Vicki Fishlock in describing the rescue, "Relief! Rescues where family members are around are stressful, and I'm always happy when everyone is safely back in the cars. And I have to admit that the reunions always bring a tear to my eye. The intensity of their affection for each other is one of the things that makes elephants so special."

Despite the confrontation at the beginning of the rescue, Fishlock thinks the mother elephant understood in the end that the humans were only trying to help her baby. "She didn't charge us, she didn't run away. Eventually after five minutes they just walked out. I think she did understand. I certainly felt like she had forgiven us for our very impolite behavior."