Man encounters elephant, elephant takes a selfie.
That’s what 22-year-old Christian LeBlanc says happened to him while he was traveling with his girlfriend in Thailand earlier this year. He told CNN that the couple had “[come] across a couple elephants,” and had decided to buy some bananas to feed them.
But it seems one elephant had something else in mind.
“The elephant quickly ate what little bananas I had and become touchy, trying to find more food,” LeBlanc, a college student from Vancouver, told ABC News. “Next thing I knew it grabbed my GoPro by the mount.” LeBlanc added that the camera had been set to continuous shooting mode at the time.
This was the extraordinary result of the encounter:
“I got the selfie of a lifetime, which I can't take full credit for," LeBlanc told ABC News of the surprising snap. “Elephants are incredibly intelligent, and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action.”
LeBlanc’s “elphie” was taken earlier this year, but the photograph has only gone viral this week.
It’s certainly an incredible image, but as CNN points out, it isn’t actually the world’s first elephant selfie as some have claimed.
Last year, an elephant at a safari park in Worcestershire, England, reportedly grabbed visitor Scott Brierley’s phone and took a selfie with it. Brierley told the BBC at the time that the elephant may have mistaken his phone for food.
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