Alesya Kafelnikova: Model who posed nude on endangered elephant for Instagram likes is tennis star's daughter
A social media influencer has attracted a lot of attention online, mostly negative reviews, after she posed naked on top of an endangered elephant in Bali. The model has been identified as Alesya Kafelnikova from Russia, who went without any clothes on her to pose on top of a Sumatran elephant. She shared a short video of her with the animal on her Instagram page on February 13.
The social media post showed the 22-year-old, who is the daughter of Yevgeny Kafelnikov — former tennis champion and world number one — lying on top of the critically-endangered animal while it shakes its ears and tail. Alesya shared the video with her more than 500K followers and captioned it as, “Natural vibes". She also posted a picture of her while the elephant was behind her. She captioned the second post as, “to love nature is human nature."
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Her short video got more than 160,000 views along with hundreds of comments. While some comments contained desperate words, like, “for the first time ever, I want to be an elephant", others were mostly about the welfare of the animal. As per The Sun, one person wrote in the comment section of the post, “Poor elephant. Aren't you ashamed to lie naked on an elephant? This is a living creature. Money overshadows everything." Another one branded the clip a "violation" against the animal. However, there was one Instagram user who went on to describe elephant’s nature as they wrote, “According to research by scientists - zoologists, the elephant's brain reacts to a person in the center, which is responsible for ... tenderness. That is, an elephant, when he sees a person, experiences the same emotions that a person when he sees, for example, a puppy ..).”
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Sumatran elephants “feed on a variety of plants and deposit seeds wherever they go, contributing to a healthy forest ecosystem.” In 2012, “because half of its population has been lost in one generation — a decline that is largely due to habitat loss and as a result human-elephant conflict,” they were changed from 'Endangered' to 'Critically Endangered'.
The website adds, “Sumatra has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation within the Asian elephant’s range, which has resulted in local extinctions of elephants in many areas. Over two-thirds of its natural lowland forest has been razed in the past 25 years and nearly 70 percent of the Sumatran elephant’s habitat has been destroyed in one generation. In Sumatra’s Riau province, pulp and paper industries and oil palm plantations have caused some of the world’s most rapid rates of deforestation. Elephant numbers have declined by a staggering 80 percent in less than 25 years, confining some herds to small forest patches. These populations are not likely to survive in the long-term. The Lampung province has seen its number of elephant herds decline from twelve in the 1980s to only three by 2002. Just two of the remaining herds are considered biologically viable.”