Elephant Orphanage

So on Thursday we went to the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage and got to play with baby elephants! YES! The foundation was set up to rescue orphaned elephants whose mothers were killed by poachers, because of the human wildlife conflict, or even natural causes. They hand raise them until they no longer rely on milk for nutrition and then they can bring them to Tsavo (not necessarily where they are rescued from) where they will be "adopted" hopefully to a new herd and can grow up.

When I came to Kenya I was so set on doing research with elephants, I absolutely love them. I was really interested in working with babies of course at this foundation. I am now realizing that there are many issues when it comes to their "conservation" practices. These include the ability of these orphans to interact with wild elephants as they grew up around humans and since elephants are very social creatures, the inability to interact with the herd can be life threatening, especially for females. 

 Another thing that I really questioned was, if these babies are so traumatized that they are often found defending their mothers corpses is how do they feel when only a part of the group of orphans is taken away? When all of a sudden your friend you were growing up with in the orphanage is gone and you don't know why. Its like they died too.

 Don't get me wrong, I completely support helping any being that is suffering. However, my biggest knock on this organization is that once they release the orphans, they don't collar or chip them as that would be too "invasive" they claimed. More invasive than hand raising a baby elephant? Because they don't track their orphans or allow any outside research, there are no statistics on exactly how effective the Orphanage is toward the conservation of elephants.

These animals really are incredible (as I have said about 67839 times in this blog) and when you look into their eyes you really can see their intelligence and their emotion. Listening to the deep pitted grunts of excitement and watching them play in the water, but rush to their friends when they get too far away shows you the emotional capacity these animals have. I do appreciate the compassion from people that want to help them, especially when they are orphaned because of HUMAN conflicts. What I would advise anyone who wants to get involved in helping elephant conservation is to really research the NGO you sponsor, see if there are any studies or papers on their success. The biggest thing is education, ivory poaching is starting to flare up again and something like 70% of people in Asia don't know that ivory comes from elephants. Also, because since colonialism Africans have been left out of conservation (look at who runs parks and NGOs) many in rural areas really don't see how African wildlife is an asset other than for tourism. What the Sheldrick foundation does so very well is educate people on the beauty and importance on saving these animals. When we were there, a large group of school children were very nervous to see the elephants and jumped back and screamed multiple times. During the visit however, the keepers were incredible teaching everyone about the elephants and toward the end the kids behavior completely changed from being scared to being eager to touch the elephants as they walked by.