“It was then that I noticed he was in lust,” is, I hope, not something I ever have grounds to say about any encounter I may share with an elephant.


Yet for one 66-year-old Irish motorist, this is precisely what happened when, celebrating his birthday in a South African game reserve, he found himself “hemmed in” by an enormous, amorous and salivating elephant.

The Irishman told press that the elephant “was agitated” and “started to rub himself against the car, breaking the wing mirrors and cracking the windows”.

"When he began to tip the car over I started to get worried,” he added.

Hang on a minute! He began to feel worried only when the elephant began to tip the car over?

Call me a coward but I feel confident that my level of concern would have hit the extreme mark at about the time the frisky dumbo approached the car with a rose clasped in its trunk reciting love poetry. If not that, then certainly at the moment it locked my vehicle in a passionate embrace.

Talk about bad luck… It’s thought to be the first known case of an elephant attempting to mate with a car. Biologists believe that the offspring would have resembled a kind of four-wheeled super-industrial hoover with floppy ears.

Imagine the disbelief of the man’s car insurance company when they caught the claim: cause of accident? Amorous elephant.