John G., do you have a camera with a foot-long lens? Were these critters in a zoo?
I had two cameras with me on the trip. One was a Nikon Coolpix (the one that Ashton Kutcher did commercials for) with a 10x zoom lens and the other was a Sony with a 25x zoom lens, both rather regular cameras. And they were taken on safari, so the animals were in the wild and we were in a jeep just driving through their land.
The first day or two, it sort of felt like being in a Disneyland theme park ("Oh, I know you're going to say/The trees are papier mache ..."). But when we were charged by an angry elephant, it wasn't so zoo-like anymore. We stood our ground, as one is supposed to do (actually, we were in a jeep and really couldn't run anywhere anyway), and the elephant eventually went away, but he came awfully close.