Cute animal videos have always been and will always be popular on the Internet. In fact, cute animal videos are so popular, you could start breaking them down into sub categories involving animals learning to do things, weird animals interacting with each other and my personal favorite, animals reminding us of just how human they are.
The above video most definitely falls in that last category. It features a family of three elephants being reunited after a period of time in which they were apart, and it is remarkably how familiar the whole thing seems. Mom elephant stands beside the kid watching as dad elephant approaches. Kid elephant gets excited and runs to meet dad. Dad offers a hey-what’s-up-look before embracing his elephant wife. It’s positively adorable, and it’s already attracted more than eighty thousand views in just a few short days.
The footage was shot at the Addo Elephant Park, which features hundreds of elephants. The camerawoman, Joan Young, wonders in the description how the little elephant is able to recognize the father, but I imagine it’s the same way we recognize our parents. There’s no doubt little differences animals use all the time to distinguish between relatives and strangers.
If you feel like checking out another adorable animal behave like a human being, I would advise watching the video I’ve embedded below. It features a dog who is so frightened about riding in a car that he continually asks his owner to hold his paw while on the road.