This is my beloved sponsored elephant. She is 3 years old. After some intense reading, I am all caught up on her keepers’ diary entries for the past year. I am so so proud of her progress and her developing personality and the place she has carved for herself in the social structure of the nursery herd. She is being cared for at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust nursery stockade in Nairobi Kenya. The differences i see with this elephant rescue have to do with intention. Their intention is to teach these elephants how to be elephants and then return them to the wild. They will not spend their lives in a zoo or an enclosure. They are going to return to the wild, be accepted into a wild herd, and mate with other wild elephants. Elephants learn everything they need to know from their elders, so its very important that these orphaned elephants grow up knowing how to forage, how to socialize, how to communicate, how to discipline other members and when to discipline other members, how to dust bathe to keep bugs off, how to charge predators and protect young, and a host of other things. The keepers make a serious commitment, vowing to stay with the elephants 10 years and sleeping on a bed in the stockade stalls each night to stay with the elephants. The elephants view these keepers as their surrogate mothers, and once they grow up and have wild babies, they often return to the stockade to show the keepers their new little one, just as one would return to their mother to show the new grandchild. My sweet brave girl is a tomboy with no fear who often spars with the baby bull elephants and charges lions when they are encountered. I think that this rescue has put so much work into how they can best run an operation that gradually transitions orphaned elephants back into the wild and they run an anti-poaching operation as well, making sure the wild they are returning to is safe. They also put a lot of effort into what you as the customer are getting out of sponsoring an elephant. You get a hand painted watercolor of an elephant or elephants each month, you get daily keeper diary entries, yearly high definition photos of your elephant and daily cell phone quality photos of the nursery herd (you can sponsor older elephants but they are in the wild so the photos will be less frequent as the keepers are no longer with them daily), and you get to learn about all the elephants in the herd, not just yours. Most elephants are orphaned because of one of three reasons. If there is a drought and there are either not enough resources to sustain the whole herd or the young elephants cant walk fast enough to keep up and they must hurry to the next water source before they drop from dehydration, the mothers will leave the babies behind out of sheer survival. A mother can have another baby, but the baby will not survive if the mother dies trying to care for it. When the herd is at stake in drought the babies will be left behind. There is also poaching. There still are those who would kill an elephant just for the ivory of his/her tusks and often times such an incident leaves behind a now unattended baby elephant that has no way to obtain milk, clinging to the dead mother’s mutilated body. The elephant i sponsor was a victim of human/wildlife conflict. What this means is that her mother was hungry and came upon a farmer’s entire year’s salary worth of crops. The elephant ate the crops, the farmer killed the elephant, and her baby was wounded by a spear in the struggle. She ran off into the wilderness without her mother. Imagine her enthusiasm when creatures who looked just like the ones who murdered her mother a day ago showed up to “rescue” her. She wasnt having it. She took off and escaped them but they worked hard to find her again, knowing she wouldnt survive without her mother’s milk. They have found an elephant milk substitute by mixing coconut fat and human milk formula together. The quickest way for these baby elephants to expire is if their stomachs cant handle the supplemented nourishment. The sheldrick wildlife trust has worked very hard to fine tune the best supplemental milk they can offer them over the years. They are very fragile at this age without their mothers and the sheldrick wildlife trust works so hard to save them all and return them to the wild. I have always LOVED elephants. There is no font size large enough to express how intelligent and curious and emotional i think these creatures are. Here’s the thing…i’ve given $500 to sponsor her for 10 years. That’s just $50 a year. If you want you can sponsor an elephant for only 1 year. That would work out to $4.16 a month. The thing that the sheldrick wildlife trust has realized is that not all of us have money to spend. Some of us are living paycheck to paycheck. They want everyone to be able to connect with elephants, regardless of what level of income they have, so while that is their minimum pricing, they invite people who can afford to donate more who feel moved to do so to offer more but they want to make sure that those who cannot afford most animal sponsorships can also follow the progress of favorite elephants and read daily keeper diaries. So, elephants are a passion of mine. They are not for everybody. If this is not your thing just click on to the next post. However, if you do want to follow an elephant in the nursery herd in nairobi or even just meet the wild-born babies former orphans bring back to meet the keepers at the stockade, i will put a link to their website below so you can check it out. It is the most affordable sponsorship i have ever encountered and i have thoroughly enjoyed learning about and watching the elephants grow over the past couple years. They do offer pre-scheduled tours where you can fly over there and observe your sponsored elephant during their daily morning feed time. You cannot touch the elephants but if one comes over to the edge and trunk touches you, that’s allowed. I wish i could go but im deathly afraid of flying so instead i watch youtube videos uploaded by people who went themselves and live vicariously through them as the head keeper introduces the elephants to the crowd and tells a bit about each elephant as they eat. If you love elephants, give the website a look over. They are very consistent with their content and you will get constant updates as your sponsored elephant grows. Its a great way for kids to feel connected to the animals we share this world with. Lions, impalas, and warthogs make regular appearances in the keeper’s diary entries about the daily walks with the herd through the brush and you will learn more than you ever thought possible about the way elephants communicate and their social behavior.
