Turn up your volume! Although considered gentle giants, elephants will go to great lengths to protect their calves. Just LISTEN to the power of the elephants’ ROAR in the face of danger.

In this video, a pack of more than fourteen African Wild Dogs attempt to corner a small herd of elephants trailing a young calf. The young calf serves as an easy target for these voracious predators, known as painted hunting dogs or painted wolves.

Individually, they stand at about 20-30 inches in height and weigh between forty and fifty pounds. But in large packs they make for formidable predators — even against a large Bush elephant calf. 

African Bush elephants are the largest terrestrial mammals, and although they have no direct predators due to their massive size, their calves are always at risk of attack, primarily by crocodile, lion leopard or hyena, but certainly not exempt from a large enough pack of wild dogs.

In this video, the daring pack of dogs make several group attempts to converge upon the young calf, but the mother and other family members effectively stand their ground. When one of the dogs gets too close, the elephant charges the pack, trumpeting with its trunk sailing high.

The dogs are relentless, pushing the elephants further into the bush. The mother elephant tenderly helps her young calf ascend a small incline with her trunk and they rejoin a larger group, certainly dissuading the dogs from further advances.

African wild dogs, also known as painted dogs, are some of the most efficient and ferocious predators on Earth. They have the ability to crush bone with their powerful bite force, as well as utilize a group attack formation to take out prey as large as elephants. In this video the pack is trying to close in on a young elephant calf that nearly gets separated from the herd.

This amazing scene was filmed at Ingwelala, a nature reserve in South Africa.