But for this kind man from Costa Rica, all lives matters, so the moment he found a badly injured crocodile suffering on the bank of a river, he rushed to save the hapless creature. 

What happened next is the greatest friendship a human being and a wild beast could ever share! Gilberto “Chito” Shedden – a local fisherman and a wildlife enthusiast from the city of Siquirres in the Limón province of Costa Rica – initially met Pacho, the crocodile, in 1989. 

The 1200lbs reptile was lying on the bank of the Reventazón-Parismina River, and its fate seemed sealed after it got seriously injured by a cattle farmer. But Gilberto was determined to nurse him back to health, so he grabbed the massive creature, put it into his boat and taken it to his home. 

 For the next six months or so, the kind fisherman cared for the helpless crocodile like it was his own child. Chito fed his new friend over 65lb of meat every single day, to help it too fully recover. 

But to do so, Pacho needed more than just food! “Food wasn’t enough. The crocodile needed my love to regain the will to live,” Chito explained for the Tico Times. “I just wanted him to feel that someone loved him, that not all humans are bad.” 

 Thanks to the love and comfort it got from its caretaker, Pacho’s condition significantly improved, and when the time came, Chito decided to release it back in the wild. 

But surprisingly, the crocodile simply refused to leave the man who showed so much kindness to it. From that moment on, the two were inseparable. 

With the rescued crocodile living in a pond next to Gilberto’s house, the two friends have spent every day together…for the next 22 years! The pair even gained worldwide fame in the 2000s, when they featured in a documentary called ‘The Man Who Swims With Crocodiles.’ 

For over a decade, Chito and his best buddy Pacho used to perform for tourists in an artificial lake at Finca Las Tilapias. 

Though for everyone sound incredible for a man to swim, and play with a massive crocodile, Chito has never feared his buddy could ever hurt him. “After two or three years, something could happen, maybe… but after 22 years of loving each other, nothing has ever happened, so I don’t think so,” the man said. 

 On October 12th, 2011, the friendly crocodile passed away, from natural causes. It is believed it was over 60-year-old. But its inspiring friendship with the man who saved its life will remain for ever.

 
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Almost as if she is saying "Don't talk to strangers". Baby elephants are nothing if not curious. They’re either trying to figure out why they can’t squeeze themselves into their old bathtubs, refusing to leave their favorite mud spot, or trying to determine why they have such a long nose. 

 So, when the baby elephant in the video below discovered some tourists, it wanted to investigate. The mother, though, was having none of that. The protective mama elephant quickly pulled her baby away from the tourists. 

As the park wrote beneath the video, it's "almost as if she is saying, 'Don't talk to strangers.'" The curious baby was excited to see the tourists, but ultimately followed his mom — after all, mom always knows best. Nice job of parenting there. 

The mom didn’t make a big deal out of it—she wasn’t being a hero—but she calmly and effectively redirected her child’s attention elsewhere to steer it potentially out of danger. Now the baby elephant can go back to doing what it does best—playing with birds. Kruger National Park, in northeastern South Africa, is one of Africa’s largest reserves. Its high density of wild animals includes the Big 5: lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and buffalos. 

Hundreds of other mammals make their home here, as do diverse bird species such as vultures, eagles and storks.

 
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Due to a rare condition, the commonly red fur comes with some dark stripe, making those creatures a sight to behold! Also known as the cross fox, the majestic creature has a unique feature because of a rare condition called melanism. 

Unlikely the albinism, who’s a lack of skin pigmentation, the melanism occurs because of the skin’s black pigmentation. 

And while most of the animals with this rare condition have a totally black fur, in this particularly situation things are a little different. Maybe that’s why they’re even more fascinating. Even though cross foxes are incredibly hard to spot these days, things looked completely different in the past. 

According to wildlife experts, these majestic creatures were once roaming the North America in high numbers. 

Unfortunately, at the beginning oh the 20th century, due to a high demand of their fur, they almost went extinct. The cross foxes share a lot of similarities with the red foxes. In fact, they only got a larger tail and of course a different fur colour. 

Their name was given due to a long dark stripe running down its back, intersecting another stripe to form a cross over the shoulder. “Our first encounter was calculated, I was focused on how not to disturb this wild animal,” said photographer Sam Gaby, the one who encountered the unique animal in Newfoundland, Canada. 

“But at the same time, I was trying to assure him that I was not a threat.” “He was unsure about my presence, each cautious step forward was followed by two steps back, and our first encounter didn’t last long,” Gaby said. 

“I moved slowly, but by the time I prepared my camera and locked eyes with him, he ran off.” You can watch the rare melanistic fox, bellow:

  Speaking of melanism, a few month ago an incredible black serval was spotted in the wild. 

The stunning snap of the secretive feline was captured by the British photographer George Turner in Tanzania.

 

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But the way this future-to-be-mom decided to protect her unborn babies is something unseen. 

In a story like never before, a pregnant pig break out of a factory farm to safely give birth to her babies.

  While walking her dog in a forest near Nottingham in England, Anna Aston was pretty surprised to spot a mother pig and her newborn piglets. Initially she thought they might be wild boars, but then she quickly realized there are actually farm pigs. 

It is then when Anna knew she came across a very unusual situation. “I knew they weren’t wild boar; they just looked like ordinary pigs,” the woman told BBC. “I was thinking, ‘This isn’t right’. You just don’t get them in a wood.” 

Concerned about the safety of the tiny piglets and their protective mom, Anna called Brinsley Animal Rescue. Next day Jon Beresford and Beth Hewis went to investigate. 

  “[We] found she had escaped from an adjacent pig farm and had her babies in the woods,” Jon told The Dodo. “The babies looked well, [but] she was thin and able to graze but not forage for food as she had a ring through her nose.”

Yet, how surprisingly how it sounds, the rescuers couldn’t do too much to save the female and her babies. Because Matilda – how they named her – escaped from a farm, they just could not pick them and take them to the shelter. 

  “She had the maternal drive to escape and save her babies, but we couldn’t just collect them,” Jon said. “Ultimately, we needed the consent of the owners.” But finding the owners probed a nearly impossible task, so the two rescuers took the media in order to save them. 

Fortunately for everyone involved, the story went viral and a happy ending was closer than anyone expected. But not without hard efforts!

  Eventually, after Matilda and her babies have been taken back to the farm she initially escaped, thanks to a fund raiser, a lot of kind people and tireless efforts, she and her babies find a safe place to live for the rest of their lives. 

  “Matilda & her eight piglets have spent the first night of freedom with us resting,” the animal rescue wrote on Facebook. “She is such a good mother too them, now she no-longer needs to worry about their plight.”