That seems wildly optimistic to me. Suppose they look the same but they smell quite different? I'm thinking this is something we would be largely oblivious to but that an elephant would not, for reasons I hope are obvious.
Well, the calf would have spent 22 months in the uterus of the mother, and passed through the mother's birth canal. I suspect anything spending that much time there would smell approximately similar. Also, I find it unlikely that the elephant is doing some "does it smell like an elephant" test on the thing that it knows it just birthed. Maybe some creatures with less intelligence might actually behave that way, because they might be happy eating the babies of an unrelated mother of the same species, but don't want to eat their own. But I suspect elephants don't have that evolutionary pressure, especially considering that they help raise the calves of other members of their group, and have been known to adopt orphaned baby elephants that they're presented with in one way or another.
