You see a lot of weird shit on the internet these days - half of which turns out to be fake, doctored or exaggerated, let's face it.
But while some of the hoax pictures and stories can be a little tricky to spot, thanks to both ever-developing technology and the fact that these days anything can happen, we'd all like to hope we wouldn't fall for the really, truly blatant stuff.
Not James Corden, it seems, who tweeted an image of an elephant carrying a tiny lion cub on its trunk while walking peacefully alongside a lioness.
This is beautiful x
Isn’t this the most stunning picture?! A lioness and her cub were crossing the savannah; the heat was excessive and the cub was in great difficulty. An elephant realized that the lion cub would die and carried him in his trunk to a pool of water, walking beside his mother. 😍
Embarrassing Bodies' Dr Christian Jessen was the first to share the, er, unbelievable photo, gushing on Twitter: "Isn't this the most stunning picture?!
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"A lioness and her cub were crossing the savannah; the heat was excessive and the cub was in great difficulty.
"An elephant realised that the lion cub would die and carried him in his trunk to a pool of water, walking beside his mother."
Jesus, Christian. Really?
Corden then retweeted the image, adding: "This is beautiful."
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Just to really hit the clueless-mum vibe home, he also added a kiss at the end.
Jessen's tweet has racked up 68,000 likes, while Corden's has another 26,000.
Sadly for them, it it looks like those likes are less 'Yes, this is beautiful, I agree' and more 'WTF, dude?!', with one person tweeting: "The amount of people that believe this AND vote scares me."
Another person commented: "It's also not real I'm afraid. Wild animals don't do such things except maybe in the Lion King."
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A third added: "Oh come on James, a terrible fake."
That’s not even the full image, someone has cropped it... If you look at the original there’s also a giraffe trying to eat a man in a balloon and that vulture is about to fly away with a baby hippo.
Many others also joined in the conversation by posting similar photoshopped animal photos, including some hilarious mash-ups that I'm really hoping Corden and Jessen don't fall for.
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You may remember seeing the image circulating on Twitter before when it was shared, unsurprisingly, on April Fool's Day last year.
Kruger Sightings, a crowd-sourced service that lets people share wildilfe sightings in Kruger National Park, tweeted the image, writing: "We were following a lioness carrying her cub & she was getting really tired.
"An elephant showed up wanting to help the lioness. The elephant put its trunk down, the cub jumped up & the elephant carried the lion cub!!
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"S28, 3km from S entrance Tinged by Sloof Lirpa."
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Viral, James Corden, Animals
