An article that narrates the tale of two elephants that fought in Kerala was published by vartamanjari.in. The title of this article in Kannada translates to ‘Look At The Story Of The Leopard That Went To The Elephant’s Trunk.’ It contains a thumbnail in which an elephant can be seen on top of a leopard while a monkey, seemingly wailing, sits and watches with a baby in its hands. There is also a youtube video link provided in the article, claiming that it was a rare incident in Kerala. Let’s verify the details of this video.
Claim: A story of a leopard that went under an elephant’s trunk and a fable of a fight that erupted between two elephants in Kerala.
Fact: The article’s title, its thumbnail, the story, and the contents provided in the video linked in the article do not correlate. The thumbnail is created using old images. There are no news reports of two elephants that fought in Kerala recently, and the video linked is from March 2022. There are multiple online videos with a thumbnail similar to the articles. Hence the claim made in the post is False.
We ran a reverse image search on the internet and found that the images used in the article’s thumbnail have been used in the past to make other thumbnails (here and here). The elephant’s image is a stock photo captured in Thailand (here), and photographer Avinash Lodhi (here and here) has captured the picture of the crying monkey. Clearly, the article’s thumbnail is edited.
We performed a basic keyword search to know if any news reports were published about the incident where two elephants fought in Kerala. This did not lead us to any credible resources.
The article also provides a link to a video, and in its last paragraph, mentions it is the video of a rare incident that happened in Ka. The video is titled ‘ ‘Herd Of Elephants Rescues Baby Monkey From Leopard Hunting – Elephant vs Lion, Rhino, Crocodile.‘
This Youtube video was uploaded in March 2022. Here Ka can be the state code of Karnataka. We looked for news reports about a herd of elephants rescuing a baby monkey in Karnataka, but that led us to no relevant information. This article clearly uses a photoshopped image as a thumbnail. It contains a story which is unrelated to the thumbnail and the title, and an old video about an incident that was not reported by any reputed organization. With this evidence, we can conclude that it is a clickbait story concocted with various unrelated elements.
This photo contains unrelated images captured at various places to spread a false narrative.
