Love, Life, and Elephants

by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

  It was with mixed feelings that I saw Sam and Amboseli sedated and ushered into two large trucks for the journey to Tsavo, where others from Solio would soon join them. All would be held in mobile holding pens for a time, their dung meanwhile scattered around to anchor them once they were released, as well as to introduce them through scent to the others. Everything went like clockwork until, tragically, Sam was fatally wounded by a large bull elephant after refusing to vacate a mud wallow he had found in a sandy riverbed and which the elephant also now wanted. He was unceremoniously heaved out and in the process a tusk penetrated his side.

  Although in great pain, he managed to drag himself back to the holding pens, and as soon as Jill and I were told, we rushed down to Tsavo with the vet to try to patch him up, taking with us a huge basket of fruit as a special treat. But as soon as we reached him we knew the prognosis, for already there was the fetid smell of death. Peritonitis had taken hold, so there was no hope of a recovery. Tearfully we fed him the fruit we had brought him before the vet administered the lethal injection that would end his life and his agony. Thankfully, though, the news of Amboseli was far happier. She went on to have several wild-born calves, having established a territory for herself near Aruba, though not before spending several months searching for any evidence of Sam, during which time she was constantly on the move and wandered far and wide. I was learning that even rhinos, despite their complicated social structure and ancient origin, also made friends for life.

  Unhappily, there would be many other rhino tragedies in the future, not least Makosa, who, having killed a keeper, had to be shot. Then Scud, who returned pregnant by a wild bull and with a seriously damaged foreleg in which the radial nerve had been severed. We nursed her until the birth of her calf, Magnum, but the leg withered, rendering her a cripple and unable to keep up with her baby, so she had to be put down and her calf reared as an orphan. He grew up to be a rare rhino success story, as far as we know still living as a wild rhino in Nairobi National Park. Not so the rhino companion who was reared along with him, called Magnet, another Nairobi Park orphan who was mysteriously shot and clandestinely buried by the authorities under suspicious circumstances, which we were cautioned not to investigate too seriously. Then there was the tiny, premature and very precious Maalim, aborted by his mother in the Ngulia sanctuary, so small that he could have fitted into a shoebox; amazingly he lived until he was two, but then ingested some milk into his lungs which his premature cilia were unable to expel. Pneumonia took him from us. Orphan Shida was, we believed, like Magnum, another rhino success until he became unpredictable around the compound, bent on keeping an eye on blind Maxwell, who could never be set free. He was translocated to Tsavo and, unbeknownst to us, tipped out into the Ngulia rhino sanctuary where he was promptly killed by another rhino as an intruder, the necessary lengthy introductory process bypassed. As soon as we heard that he had been introduced into the Ngulia sanctuary we knew he was as good as dead, and rushed to erect a holding enclosure for him, but sadly it was not completed in time.

  Following the tragedy of Sam, there was further grim news from Tsavo concerning our elephant orphan Ol Jori, who was apparently suffering a creeping paralysis. Of course Eleanor would not leave his side for a moment, so her wellbeing was also now being compromised. Jill and I therefore decided to bring Ol Jori back to the nursery, even though I knew that removing him from Eleanor would not go down well. It so happened that both Olmeg and Taru were now two years old and could be transferred to Tsavo to replace Ol Jori in Eleanor’s affections. And so, as Eleanor lost Ol Jori, she gained two for the price of one and was over the moon.

  It transpired that Ol Jori had climbed a large boulder near the stockades, missed his footing, and tumbled off the boulder on to his back. Sadly, he died a few days after coming to us, and a subsequent post mortem revealed that the scar tissue from the accident had constricted the spinal column and was the cause of his paralysis. And so another little grave had to be dug in the forest behind my home, amid more tears, but also anger that the keepers had kept the accident from us, which meant that Ol Jori had suffered longer than necessary.

  There have been so many such painful and emotional moments over the years that I have wished at times I had chosen an easier path. Animals weave their way into one’s heart so completely that each death is a painful bereavement. But whenever I am embroiled in an emotional meltdown, I force myself to dwell on the plight of the wild elephant matriarchs, who so stoically face the adversity that dogs every step of their long and difficult lives. They grieve just as deeply for each loved one, yet they find the courage to turn the page and concentrate on the living. Life is for the living, not the dead, who belong to the past and are at peace and beyond all further pain and suffering ‘somewhere in the great somewhere’, as my Granny Webb would say. I liked to think that they would find David at the other side to be there for them. Elephant matriarchs sometimes even have to steel themselves to abandon a living weakling to its fate, walking away with its cries ringing in their ears, since failure to do so would jeopardize the survival of the others in the family and herd. To give up would be a cruel and cowardly course to take, depriving others that might need help, so it was, quite simply, never an option.

  I especially needed to draw on the example of the elephants after the death of my parents – first that of my father on 20 April 1987, who, like Grandpa Webb, died peacefully in his sleep, and then on 31 January 1994 my beloved mother, who was happy to join him after the blissfully happy sixty years she had spent by his side. I wept buckets of tears each time and missed them both acutely. My mother was such a gentle, understanding, warm and hospitable lady and my father a role model – his honesty and integrity an inspiration to my siblings and me. Following each death, Peter travelled to South Africa to bring our parents’ ashes back and scattered them at the site of the biltong Musandari camp near Narok, a place they both loved and which teemed with wildlife. Had circumstances been different, Cedar Park, our beautiful childhood home, would have been the first choice, but sadly it now bore no resemblance to what we had known, the beautiful cedar panelling turned into charcoal, and the house itself a place for the new owners’ livestock.

  Time passed, and down in Tsavo Eleanor adored Olmeg and Taru, mothering them as her own. She had also acquired several other orphans who were old enough to bypass the nursery stage – among them a young bull named Chuma, the word for ‘iron’ in Swahili, who was proving a lively sparring partner for Olmeg and Taru. Young bull elephants, like young human boys, spend a lot of time wrestling together in a test of strength, identity and rank, and during such bouts Olmeg usually came off second best to Taru, who was younger. Olmeg then befriended a young wild bull of similar age whom, although he was wild, the keepers named Thomas, since he was such a frequent visitor to the orphan group. It was Thomas who decided to back up Olmeg in his sparring bouts with both Taru and Chuma, and together they got topsides of both, which boosted Olmeg’s hitherto dented confidence no end. I was glad of this, because confidence in a boy is important, and since Olmeg was our first nursery success, I had a particularly soft spot for him.

  The year 1990 also saw the arrival of one-week-old Ajok, whose name means ‘hello’ in the Turkana dialect. He was the youngest elephant orphan we had received in our nursery, rescued from far-off Lake Turkana, the product of strong genes honed by natural selection. He was from a small population of elephants who managed to survive against all the odds in that arid lava desert. For a time he had the nursery mud bath audience all to himself, thoroughly enjoying being the centre of attention and playing to the gallery with a variety of ‘party tricks’. He could ‘shiver’ his trunk repeatedly right from the very top to the very tip, making everyone laugh, wrap it around people’s necks and gradually exert pressure to get a reaction, sit down like a circus elephant and even lie with all four legs in the air. However, having been alone in the nursery since he was just one week old, it was important to get him down to Tsavo to join the other orph
ans sooner than usual to learn the social skills he would need as a wild elephant. He went to join Eleanor’s group as soon as he was two.

  With the passing of time, Eleanor and the older members of her adopted family took to spending extended periods away with the wild herds. Having been a confident loner for so long, Ajok never entirely fitted into Eleanor’s unit. Being subservient to so many older bulls was not to his liking, so he took himself off to seek out some with whom he could spar competitively, spending time away. Mischievous by nature, he also took to going on to Simon Trevor’s verandah at night and heaving a camp chair over the low wall with a satisfying clatter. Suspicion fell on one of our ex-orphans, so JF lay in ambush to determine the identity of the culprit and sure enough, it was Ajok who was caught red-handed as JF burst out of the door with a blaringly loud Portoblast. Ajok fled in bellowing disarray, getting tangled up in an electric wire in the process, which persuaded him to sever his human ties completely and become a truly wild Tsavo elephant. We never saw him again, and Simon’s camp chair has remained undisturbed on the verandah ever since.

  The arrival of Jill’s first daughter – my first grandchild – was a moment of immense joy. Emily Laura was born on 22 February 1992. Jill and JF were not officially married, so JF had difficulty convincing the matron that he was, in fact, the father even though he was unable to produce the required marriage certificate. I couldn’t help wondering what my very traditional parents and grandparents would have had to say about Jill having a baby out of wedlock. Following the breakdown of her first marriage, she was adamant that a piece of paper and a hollow promise to be with someone for life was unrealistic, and I certainly was not in a position to argue about that. The ‘Laura’ part of Emily’s name honoured Bill’s mother, Laura Woodley.

  A few months later a one-month-old elephant from Tsavo came into our lives, named Emily in my absence by the keepers in honour of my granddaughter. It was out of character for us to name an elephant thus, for we usually chose place or tribal names that would identify that particular animal’s origin and circumstances in our minds. However, the keepers were adamant, so Emily she was.

  Emily had been extracted from a disused pit latrine near the Manyani prison camp as her herd crossed from Tsavo West into Tsavo East. Staff from the prison hauled her out covered in human waste, and when her mother returned to claim her, hearing her bellows, she failed to recognize the foul-smelling apparition that confronted her and tossed the baby into the air before fleeing herself. It took time for Emily to recover after being orphaned in such an unsavoury manner, which left her with stomach problems, but in the end she made it and would grow up to become a very important player in the future, the first of our nursery-reared elephants to present us with a wild-born calf. Furthermore, having experienced the nursery, she understood how the orphans came to be with us, and after the birth of her own first calf was sufficiently confident to share the baby with her human family and the keepers who had reared her.

  As time went by our ex-orphans in Tsavo grew in number, with regular additions from the Nairobi nursery. Reunions in Tsavo among those who had known one another in the nursery were always extremely touching, for recognition was instant and the welcome always exuberant. Eleanor was always overjoyed to welcome additions to her adopted unit, all the orphans regarding themselves as ‘family’. Unfortunately, though, the eating habits Eleanor had acquired during the bad old roadside days remained in evidence, so in order to prevent her from corrupting the new intake of nursery-reared elephants, we had to electrically fence the KWS Voi Headquarters compound. Hand-feeding the orphans was strictly forbidden at the nursery and now also at Voi, being the sure recipe for a bullet should corrupted elephants become a threat in human habitation while they were seeking handouts. The keepers had instructions that whenever the orphans crossed a tourist road, the men had to hide so that tourists would not be able to differentiate between the orphaned herd and a wild one.

  There had been a succession of other Wildlife Directors to head the Kenya Wildlife Service, following a terrible plane accident in which Dr Leakey lost both his feet. Radical changes would take place within the structure of the service which would compartmentalize all aspects of field management, depriving the field wardens of direct control and instead disseminating it to a host of officers senior to them, based mainly back at the Nairobi Headquarters. As predicted, funds for the field were compromised due to the financial burden of such an unwieldy bureaucracy at the Headquarters level. As a result, we at the Trust found the need to play a key role in support of the field in Tsavo, through regular donations of fuel to keep the anti-poaching forces mobile, to fund additional de-snaring patrols, assist with the repair of vehicles, drill boreholes and install windmills – in fact generally to bridge the financial gaps whenever possible and meet contingencies that cropped up unexpectedly. Poaching was a problem all over again, with illegal hauls of ivory intercepted en route to the Far East. Another serious problem was the bush meat business. Whereas previously this business had been mainly for subsistent purposes, now it had turned commercial, viewed as a delicacy in West Africa, where animals had been almost eaten to extinction. It was now exported there from Kenya as well as to the Middle East, where it was also on the increase, and even to the capitals of Europe, which were now home to a large number of West African immigrants.

  In January 1994 we were presented with another real challenge which would be a first for the Trust, for this little elephant arrived still covered in foetal material. His mother had been shot in the process of giving birth to him near the Imenti forest, home of both Ndume and Malaika, and because it was obvious that he had never been able to benefit from her first colostrum milk, we knew that his immune system would be defective, leaving him vulnerable to disease, and that it would be just a question of time before another little grave had to be dug in the Park forest. We named this orphan Imenti and he was heartbreakingly perfect, with soft, shiny, supple skin and petal pink ears, and so trusting and unafraid that he snuggled up to whichever pair of legs happened to be nearest. Eventually the vet suggested a radical solution: to take the blood from a healthy elephant, separate the plasma and infuse this into the ear vein of the calf, hoping that this might replace the role of colostrum and trigger the immune process. The only other elephant in the nursery at the time was Emily, the survivor of the pit latrine, who was still too fragile to be a possible blood donor, so we arranged for the vet to fly to Tsavo and sedate Malaika, who by now had evolved into the matriarch overseeing the keeper-dependent group whenever Eleanor and the older elephants were taking a wild walkabout, which they were now doing more frequently. And so, within forty-eight hours, Imenti received the plasma from Malaika’s blood and, miraculously, after a shaky start, it had the desired effect. It was not beyond the realms of possibility that perhaps he and Malaika shared the same gene pool, since very few elephants remained in the Imenti forest. The lessons learned with Imenti would enable us to save other such candidates in the future, one being yet another Imenti forest orphan called Wendi, whose name means ‘hope’ and who, like Emily and Imenti, would grow up to become an important player in the Trust’s orphans’ project of the future. Imenti would also turn out to be the catalyst that would enable us to establish a second rehabilitation centre at Ithumba, in northern Tsavo.

  It was also around this time that Eleanor’s unit acquired Mary, a ten-year-old female elephant who had been at the Mount Kenya Safari Club in Nanyuki since the age of two, her eventual destiny a zoo in America. Thankfully, Mary’s owner, Don Hunt, decided instead to send her down to join Eleanor and the other orphans in Tsavo, initially sceptical about how she would be received and be able to cope. He need not have worried, because she was embraced with the usual outpouring of joy from all the resident orphans, including Eleanor, and went on to give birth to a baby bull fathered by a wild suitor. We named her calf Donald, in honour of the man who had granted her freedom. It surprised us that Eleanor, who was older than Mary and who had enjoyed muc
h more wild contact, had not also fallen pregnant and given birth by now. Researchers suggested that it could be because she had not been mated in her teens, as was the norm, and as a result might be sterile.

  It was now, with the birth of Mary’s baby, that we witnessed at first hand the abduction tendencies of female elephants from a disrupted social background. Essentially maternal by nature, female elephants from disrupted families are desperate to try to recruit other babies to build a replacement family of their own, behaviour that has frequently been reported among our ex-orphans and recorded in the present-day keepers’ diaries. In this case, Eleanor immediately set about attempting to take possession of Mary’s calf, steering him beneath her body and urging him to suckle her dry breasts, denying Mary access. When no milk was forthcoming, the baby bellowed loudly, becoming increasingly frustrated and hungry. Mary was beside herself with anguish but there was little she could do to reclaim her calf, for Eleanor was older and as such higher-ranking as well as a lot bigger in body. The hierarchy among the females is equally as binding as that of the bulls and is also related to age. It was Taru and Chuma who eventually ganged up to free the calf from Eleanor and steer him back to his rightful mother. Mary then took her calf and left Eleanor’s unit entirely, attaching herself instead to another wild herd that had a more structured wild family of its own, including some newborns. From then on the keepers would come across Mary from time to time out in the bush, and although she greeted them briefly, she clearly had no desire to renew her acquaintance with either humans, Eleanor, or the nearby orphans’ stockades, which so obviously reminded her of her many years of captivity at Nanyuki.