Day 358- Tanzania Sees 'Sharp Rise' In Killing of Elephants

Elephants are under threat across Africa, campaigners say

The killing of elephants has increased sharply in Tanzania since the government suspended its anti-poaching operation after a month, Deputy Tourism Minister Lazaro Nyalandu has said.

Sixty elephants were "butchered" in November and December, compared with only two in October, Mr Nyalandu added.

The security forces adopted a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers when the operation was in force in October.

The government suspended it after an inquiry reported human rights abuses.

'Huge demand'

"The anti-poaching operation had good intentions, but the reported murders, rapes and brutality are totally unacceptable," Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying earlier this month.

The inquiry, carried out by MPs, found that 13 civilians were killed and more than 1,000 people arrested during the month-long crackdown, codenamed "Operation Terminate".

The findings led to President Jakaya Kikwete sacking Defence Minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, Home Affairs Minister Emmanuel Nchimbi, Tourism and Natural Resources Minister Khamis Kagasheki and Livestock Development Minister David Mathayo.

Mr Nyalandu said that, with the operation suspended, the government would appeal to foreign donors to help strengthen Tanzania's wildlife department and ranger service.

"Those to be approached include the European Union and Asian countries. Asian countries are reportedly the main consumers of elephant tusks and by-products," he said.

There is huge demand for elephant tusks in many Asian countries, where they are used to make ornaments.

In October, Ivorian football star Yaya Toure joined a UN campaign against poaching, warning the slaughter of elephants threatened their existence in Africa.

~BBC News Africa

December 30, 2013

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Day 357- 2013 In Review!

Just for fun, I decided to do a challenge about this year!  Quiz your knowledge on elephants and this blog!  

You can send in your answers multiple ways: 

email me at: eis4elephants@gmail.com

or

respond to this post!

You can be the winner!

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1. What are five things elephants represent?

2. How many signatures were presented to Thailand's Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra?

3. What huge event took place in November?

4. What important person did I get a letter from?

5. What are three extinct species from Madagascar?

6. About how many Bornean Pygmy Elephants are left in the wild?

7. What fun event took place in October?

8. What are three ways of saying "I love elephants"?

9. What percentage of elephants are dead?

10.  What amazing article did I feature on my blog in December, and who was it about?

Have fun, and don't forget to send in your answers!

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Day 357- When It All Stops

“When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

~Yao Ming

Saving elephants, as followers of The Independent’s Christmas Appeal will know, seems to be a harder and harder task as the killing in Africa gets more difficult to control. But there is one particular way forward which offers hope, and which at first may seem surprising, and that is through saving sharks.

A giant vegetarian land mammal wouldn’t at first sight seem to have much in common with a deep-sea predator. But elephants and sharks share a cruel curiosity of fate: they both have bodily protuberances which humans find so valuable they will kill both sets of creatures to get them.

With elephants, or course, it’s their ivory tusks, now in booming demand especially among the rising middle class of China. With sharks, it’s their fins, an essential ingredient in what has long been another fad of wealthy Chinese: shark’s fin soup.

While elephants are killed in their thousands, sharks are killed in their millions for the soup.  The slaughter is having a drastic effect on shark populations, with 32 per cent of deep-sea species threatened with extinction.

“Shark finning” is a pitiless form of fishing involving cutting off the fins while the fish are still alive and then throwing them back into the sea. The reason is a pair of shark fins can sell in Asia for $700 a kilo – and the less valuable shark bodies would be an encumbrance on a fisherman’s boat.

But in July this year the European Union brought in a regulation ending the practice, and in future all EU boats will have to land sharks with their fins still attached.

Ali Hood, of Britain’s Shark Trust, sees this as a major step forward, not least because the EU is a big player in the shark market, with Spain alone having the third-biggest shark catch in the world, and also because the move will give the EU the moral authority to persuade other nations to do the same. But the biggest obstacle to lessening the global shark slaughter is the demand from China.

In 2006, the inventive conservation body WildAid, based in San Francisco and headed by British-born Peter Knights, began a campaign to make the Chinese public realise that shark’s fin soup represents a big conservation problem. 

The campaign took off when in 2009 China’s best-known sports star, basketball player Yao Ming, appeared in a film saying he would no longer eat the soup and used the slogan “Mei yu mai mai, jiu mei yu sha hai”, meaning “When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

The campaign appears to be having a significant effect: according to WildAid, consumption of shark fin soup has dropped by between 50 and 70 per cent in the last two years, and this month, the Chinese government banned shark fin soup from state banquets.

Now WildAid is rolling out a campaign, based on the shark fin ads, to lessen demand for ivory and rhino horn by making it socially unacceptable. Its first short film, featuring Yao Ming again, alongside Prince William and David Beckham, will air in China next month.

Mr Knights says: “The slogan and the sentiment, of connecting the buying and the killing, is already understood throughout China… And because elephants are more charismatic than sharks, and because the international profile is so much higher on the ivory issue, we really believe it can happen.”

He hopes the Chinese Government might even consider banning the sale of ivory within two years. 

~Michael McCarthy 

The Independent

December 23, 2013

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Day 356- Cuteness!

So cute!  I'm counting down the days 'till Christmas!  

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Day 355- Elephants On Your Front Porch

Can we all just take a moment to admire this amazing rug from Cultured Living?

How could you not love it?!

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Day 354- Not Loving The Facts

Done with finals!  Hooray!  

I love this article- but not it's facts.  90% of African Elephants are gone!  We need to keep these amazing animals around for the next generation! 

Up to 40,000 elephants, on average, are killed every year. That equates to one every 15 minutes. If that rate were to apply continuously, it would render the species extinct in the wild within 10 years. It is a tragedy, by any standard, that Africa has already lost some 90% of its elephants in the past half-century.

What makes it an even greater tragedy is that the world so nearly put an end to that madness a few decades ago. In 1989, a worldwide ban on the international trade in ivory was approved by CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Levels of poaching fell dramatically‹not completely, but dramatically and the black market prices of ivory slumped.

However, only 10 years later, malignant interests were able to have their way, as ever, and so-called 'one-off' sales were allowed. For example, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were allowed an experimental one-off sale of more than 49,000 kg of ivory to Japan. In 2002, a further one off-sale was approved, which resulted in 105,000 kg of ivory being shipped to China and Japan. With so much legal ivory on the market, illegal ivory was easy to pass off, and demand simply rocketed.

More elephant tusks were seized in 2011 than in any year since 1989, when the trade was banned. Sierra Leone lost its last wild elephant in 2009, and Senegal has only around five or ten elephants left. Congo has lost 90% of their wild elephant population, and so on through all the elephant states.

This intelligent, thoughtful creature is being wiped from the earth, and not for any noble reasons. By and large, they are being butchered so that mindless people, many of them Chinese, can buy chopsticks, toothpicks, combs and other trinkets.

Beyond the sheer pettiness of the trinkets, there is a more sinister motivation too. Ivory tusks and rhino horns are being hoarded as investments that rise in value as the species are depleted. In other words, investors buy these commodities in the hope that their source ­ the great species ­ will dry up.

To any thinking person, this matters in and of itself, but anyone tempted to imagine that it is a remote concern to people in this country should think again, because this dark industry fuels terrorism and the worst forms of violence around the world. The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, recognised that in his comments at the UN in New York, when he said that: the illegal trade in these animals is not just an environmental tragedy; it strikes at the heart of local communities by feeding corruption and undermining stability in what are already fragile states. And the profits from the trade pose an increasing threat to security by funding criminal gangs and terrorism.

In September, the Foreign Office stated that it was aware of reports that al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-backed Somali terror group, is being funded by ivory.  Just two weeks later, there were the appalling attacks at the Westgate mall in Nairobi. Some 40 per cent of al-Shabaab's funding is thought to come from ivory. Blood ivory has also helped to finance al-Qaeda.

It has funded Joseph Kony's abhorrent Lord's Resistance Army, and Sudan's murderous Janjaweed organisation, and many others.

The British Government has a strong role to play, and it is good news that the British army is providing training and support for anti-poaching rangers in Kenya, as well as hosting a high-level conference in London on the illegal wildlife trade next February.

One clear goal must be the elimination of one-of sales of impounded ivory, which fatally undermine the international CITES regime and fuel demand for ivory products. But it is also an opportunity for the British Government to renew and ramp up its support for the African elephant Action Plan, which has been agreed by all 38 African elephant range states, and which at this stage is probably the best hope elephants have. The good news is that the British Government will have the support it needs in Parliament.

More than 100 MPs from all Parties have signed an Early Day Motion calling on the Government to do just that.

Even better news is that the Chinese Government will be sending representatives to the February meeting. They are unlikely to want to attend a meeting only to be embarrassed, and so this could be their moment to declare support for the African Elephant Plan and announce measures to tackle domestic demand.

The Chinese delegation can take some comfort from the fact that the country¹s largest online marketplace, Taobao, has banned a range of wildlife

products: including tiger bone, rhino horn, elephant ivory, bear bile, turtle shell, pangolins and shark fin. That simply would not have happened were it not for a changing tide among Chinese consumers. 

~Zac Goldsmith

The Independent

December 8, 2013

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Day 353- The Many Uses Of A Trunk

I love this picture so much!  It's precious!  

The article below is about the many uses of an elephant's trunk!

Happy reading!

They use branches to repel flies and even make appropriate tools by breaking longer branches into shorter ones. Researchers observed this behaviour in eight of 34 adult wild elephants in Nagarhole National Park, Karnataka, India .

They then presented to 13 captive elephants, maintained under a naturalistic system, branches that were too long or bushy to be effectively used as switches. The long branches were presented in two trials to each elephant and they were given five minutes to either attempt switching with the long branch, or modify the branch and switch with the altered branch. Eight of these elephants modified the branch on at least one trial to a smaller branch and switched with the altered branch. There were different styles of modification of the branches, the most common of which was holding the main stem with the front foot and pulling off a side branch or end with the trunk.

The scientists believe that fly switching with branches is a common form of tool use in wild Asian elephants when fly intensity is high. They conclude that their documentation of the manufacture of a tool by elephants, together with the fact that these animals have a volume of cerebral cortex available for cognitive processing that exceeds that of any primate species, would appear to place this animal in the category of great apes in terms of cognitive abilities for tool use and tool manufacture.

Elephant expert Joyce Poole says “On many occasions I have watched an elephant pick up a stick in its trunk and use it to remove a tick from between its forelegs. I have also seen elephants pick up a palm frond or similar piece of vegetation and use it as a fly swatter to reach a part of the body that the trunk cannot” .

Elephants also use sticks to scratch themselves. If an elephant cannot reach some part of his body that itches with his trunk, he doesn’t always rub it against a tree: he may pick up a long stick and give himself a good scratch with that instead. If one stick isn’t long enough he will look for one that is. If he pulls up some grass and it comes up by the roots with a lump of earth, he will smack it against his foot until all the earth is shaken off, or if water is handy he will wash it clean before putting it into his mouth. .

Elephants have been observed digging holes to drink water and then ripping bark from a tree, chewing it into the shape of a ball, filling in the hole and covering over it with sand to avoid evaporation, then later going back to the spot for a drink .

Elephants have also been known to drop very large rocks onto an electric fence either to ruin the fence or to cut off the electricity. 

Elephants have been known to intentionally throw or drop large rocks and logs on the live wires of electric fences, either breaking the wire or loosening it such that it makes contact with the earth wire, thus cutting off the electricity.

~OneKind

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Day 352- Day Six

Today is day six- and the end of this wonderful interview.  Thank you to Dame Daphne Sheldrick and Laurel Neme of National Geographic!

Daphne Sheldrick with baby elephant Aisha. Photograph courtesy the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Elephant calves are very fragile in early infancy and “can be fine one day and dead the next.” How do you handle loving and caring for an infant and watching it fade? Does it ever get easier? You’ve said, “Elephants have the courage to turn the page and focus on the living.” What have you learned from that?

We draw our emotional stamina from the elephants themselves, who suffer tragedy and heartbreak on an almost daily basis, but who find the courage to turn the page, and focus on the living after grieving just as acutely as us humans, and perhaps even more so.

Whenever we are faced with tragedy and death, after copious tears, one simply has to take one’s cue from the elephants, and we do. There will be others that need your help. It would be very selfish to simply turn them away because one finds it too painful to try to help them. So one has to simply focus on the living, rather than the dead, knowing that the dead are beyond any more suffering and pain, and that one has, at least, afforded them a comfortable end surrounded by compassion and love.

You’ve said, elephants “are just like us but better than us.” How? If we could have three “elephant” qualities, what would they be? For instance, what can elephants teach us (humans) about family, nurturing, and care?

Elephants are much more caring than us humans, even in infancy. All comfort and care for those younger. They have better powers of forgiveness than us humans, despite “never forgetting,” which in elephants happens to be true. They are much more welcoming of strangers. All the orphans instantly embrace and love any newcomer, showing caring and compassion by gently touching them with their trunks, etc.

Tea Time

You describe in your book, Love, Life, and Elephants, how teatime was a special ritual:

Teatime was a fixed routine in our home, much loved by all the orphans because not only did the rattle of teacups indicate that the afternoon walk was imminent but it also meant the appearance of the teatime biscuits I baked, made from a recipe handed down from generation to generation in my family. Most of the orphans viewed these as a treat, particularly Jimmy [a kudu] and [his best friend] Baby [a feisty eland]. Gazing over the verandah ledge with drooling mouths and looks of such longing in their large liquid eyes, they pleaded with every fiber of their being and were impossible to resist, even though feeding them the biscuits was rather like posting letters, so rapidly were they downed. After observing this handout for some time, Shmetty [an orphaned infant elephant] decided she should have one as well. It was hilarious to watch, as she clearly had absolutely no idea what to do with a biscuit, waving it around in her trunk, popping it in and out of her mouth and her ear and finally sucking it up in her trunk until it got blown out in an elephant sneeze, making us all jump.

Could you divulge your biscuit recipe?

Teatime during our Tsavo years was indeed a special ritual. The biscuit recipe is that of my grandmother:

Sheldrick’s Tea Biscuits

½ lb sugar

½ lb margarine or butter

1 lb. flour

1 dessert spoon baking powder

pinch of salt

2 eggs

Cream together sugar and butter, add the eggs, work in the flour, baking powder and salt to a rolling consistency. Roll the dough out. Add either nuts, raisins etc., if wanted, and cut into shapes. Bake in a moderate oven until lightly brown.

Taking Action

Your book details numerous waves of elephant poaching in Tsavo over its history. Again, the Tsavo area faces unprecedented levels of poaching. What needs to be done to reduce poaching? What can the average person do to help?

The poaching in Tsavo today is probably worse than it has ever been. To control it requires a two-pronged approach: radical penalties at this end for poaching perpetrators (perhaps even the death sentence as elephant populations run out); and the international community to shame the consumer countries into curbing their appetite for ivory, plus a very strong effort to rein in the international syndicates of smugglers, who also deal in drugs, etc.

Everyone can do something by raising awareness of the poaching crisis, and by raising funds to help those who are able to make even a small difference at the field level to protect and preserve the elephants. Otherwise, elephants could be extinct in the wild within the next 15 years.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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Day 351- Day Five of Elephant "Foster Mom"

Quality Keepers

How many keepers does DSWT have?

We have about 58 trained elephant keepers.

Keepers do far more than tend to the elephants; they serve as ambassadors and share stories too. How do they share information?

The keepers write the Keeper’s Diary, which records everything interesting that happens on a daily basis. That way they learn about elephants and disseminate that information to their friends and family. The public viewing at the nursery is another way of passing on information, but the monthly Keeper’s Diaries inform the global public, because they are posted on our website monthly.

What is the training for a keeper?

The training is simply being taught how to handle the calves, how to mix the milk, how to recognize anything unusual in the stools, or the appetite, and simply common sense and powers of observation, at which some are better than others, and some more caring than others.

Those more caring are most loved by the elephants. One can tell who is a good keeper simply by observing how the orphans respond to them.

While each keeper is special, who have been some of the most gifted? For instance, tell me about Mischak Nzimbi? What are their stories? What are the special talents and qualities of a keeper?

Elephants can read one’s heart. Those keepers who genuinely love their charges are special, such as Head Keepers Edwin Lusichi at the Nursery, Joseph Sauni down at the Voi Rehab Station, and especially Banjamin up at the Ithumba Rehab Centre. Mishak also has a special empathy, which is recognized by the elephants he handles. Some keepers regard their work with the elephants just as a job and a way of earning money; others genuinely care for and love the elephants. As I said before, with elephants one reaps what one sows.

Emotional Connection

What have been the most powerful examples of memory in elephants that you’ve seen? In your book you talked about Eleanor greeting her ex-keeper, despite not having seen him for 37 years.

Eleanor greeting her keeper after such a long period of time was a powerful example of elephant memory. The orphans will even recognize people they have known fleetingly in the nursery, selecting those who have cared most for them, and paid them the most attention. The orphans also recognize one another after separation when some are upgraded, and others left behind in the nursery.

I understand that elephants who are raised in the nursery and now live in the wild will bring back their own calves to “meet” their human family. Does this always happen?

Certainly all the nursery-reared orphans, who understand the origin of the calves that are relocated to the rehabilitation centers, have brought their wild-born babies to share with the keepers, who remain based at the rehabilitation centers.

Those who have been reared at the rehabilitation centers, and who never experienced the nursery, do not, because they suspect that we might have “snatched” the calves from the rightful mothers, as elephants from disrupted populations are prone to doing.

You’ve said, “When you raise an animal, you learn the inside story of that animal.” Who are some of the animals that have touched you the most? Who did you most connect with on a spiritual level?

When one has a human child, whom you see every day and raise from the moment it is born, one knows the “inside story,” that is, the mind of that child. It is the same with orphaned animals. Rearing the orphans one learns far more about them than any casual observer will ever know, because one learns how they feel and how they think.

The stories of some of the orphans who have touched my heart are recorded in my books. I love all the orphans, but the antelope orphans are some of the very special ones that I have been privileged to know intimately and have found fascinating and wonderful.

All animals are that, but the elephants are the most human emotionally. They are just like us but better than us.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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Day 350- 1,000 Rescued ♡

Below you will find the fourth part of this amazing interview!  I have learned so much, and hope my readers have too!

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What happens when orphans arrive at the rehabilitation center?

Somehow, at the other end, the ex-orphans, who are now living free as perfectly wild normal elephants again, know when others are on their way. They return to the compound to greet newcomers.

Every time nursery elephants are being moved from Nairobi, the ex-orphans mysteriously somehow know, and return to the stockade compound awaiting their arrival.

How they know this is one of those mysterious elephant mysteries that will never be fathomed by us humans. But it happens every time, even if the newcomers have never met any of the ex-orphans before, and even when the date of the move happens to change, and we have been unable to inform the keepers at the other end. Somehow, the ex-orphans always know.

I am convinced that elephants also have telepathic abilities and can read the hearts and minds of those they love, and that includes their keepers!

How amazing that the wild ex-orphans welcome new orphans! What happens with the older orphans already at the rehabilitation center?

There to greet newcomers are also all the keeper-dependent older orphans who have already been upgraded from the nursery. The newcomers are always lovingly embraced by the others, who gather around them to comfort and reassure. They surround them as they are taken out into the bush to browse for the rest of the afternoon after arrival, are with them when they go into their communal night stockades as a group and are fed their night milk feeds.

Gradually a change takes place. Rather than following their keepers, at the rehabilitation centers, the elephants begin to make their own decisions about where they want to browse, and the keepers merely follow the elephants.

When does an orphan fully transition to the wild?

Each elephant decides when it is sufficiently confident to make the transition to a wild life, encouraged by the ex-orphans, some of whom will turn up in a splinter group to escort a newcomer off for a “night out.” If during the course of the night, the newcomer decides he or she wants to return to the custody of the human family, one or two of the ex-orphans will escort the youngster back to the stockades and hand him or her over to the keepers again.

By the Numbers

How many elephants does DSWT have at each stage now?

Currently in the nursery we have 25 infants at the Northern Rehabilitation Center in Tsavo East, another 25 still keeper dependent, and at the Southern Rehabilitation Center in southern Tsavo East, another 17 still keeper dependent. Living wild are now over 70 ex-orphans, who, between them all, have about 12 wild-born babies.

How many orphaned calves has DSWT raised over the years?  How many have survived?  How many are now living in the wild?

We have successfully hand-reared over 150 orphaned elephant calves to date who have survived, and have lost about another 100 who came in too far gone for us to retrieve. Our three Mobile Veterinary Units have been able to save another 800 elephants, none of whom would otherwise have survived without our help. So we can proudly say that, with the help of caring public supporters from all over the world, DSWT has been able to save almost 1,000 elephants, which would certainly have otherwise added to the country’s death toll.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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Day 349- Part Three of Elephant "Foster Mom"

Here's part three! 

Happy reading! 

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What is a typical day for an orphaned elephant infant?

A typical day for the infant elephants revolves around their three hourly milk feeds and keeping them as happy as possible.

Keepers are with them 24 hours a day. A different keeper sleeps with a different elephant each night to ensure that no unhealthy, very strong bonds are forged. That could impact negatively on the baby elephant when a keeper takes time off, as he has obviously to do.

During the nursery stage, the baby elephants follow their human family, respond to tone of voice, etc. The keepers treat them only with tender loving care, as would their elephant family, because with elephants one reaps what one sows, and since they have very long memories, they must never be ill-treated in any way. Our keepers never carry even a twig.

Because the elephants love their keepers, they want to please them and act accordingly. They are incredibly smart, much more so than a human child of the same age, bearing in mind that at any age an elephant duplicates its human counterpart in terms of age progression.

Transitioning to the Wild

When is an elephant ready to move to the next level?

As to how we decide when to move an orphan from the nursery, that depends upon the individual. It is moved when it has healed completely and is over any post-traumatic stress. We never know how many elephants we will have at any one time. With the poaching as it is, they are coming in thick and fast.

Daphne Sheldrick and Eleanor. Photograph courtesy the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

What happens when an orphan transitions to the next level?

The orphans are ready for the transition to Tsavo when they have healed psychologically and physically, usually around about the age of two years. However, elephants are totally milk dependent if orphaned under the age of three, and they need some nutritional help up until the age of five.

We now have a specially designed truck to move the elephants from the nursery to the rehabilitation centers run by the Trust in Tsavo. It has a large side panel that folds down against the loading bays, with three spacious compartments inside, so we can move three elephants at a time. It is air-conditioned, has special suspension, and space around the compartments for the keepers to move during the journey, as well as space for all the paraphernalia that must go too—milk, bottles, fodder for the journey, and so on.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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Day 348- Part Two Of Elephant "Foster Mom"

Here is part two of National Geographic's interview with Daphne Sheldrick!

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What is your typical day?

My day begins at 5 a.m., when I get up to do my own housework, and when it is quiet and peaceful. The orphans leave their night stockades at 6 a.m., after their first milk feed of the day, and head out into the forest behind my house, which is within Nairobi National Park.

Each orphan has a book where all the feeds are recorded, as well as consistency and frequency of stools, plus any other information relevant to the health of the individual. I study each book first thing in the morning to see if anything unusual is recorded, such as loss of appetite, not sleeping well, nightmares, etc. That might be an indicator of things going wrong.

Baby elephants are extremely fragile. They can be fine one day and dead the next. That is where experience comes in—just being able to detect any such signs early enough to do something about it.

I then put food out for the birds and squirrels before bathing and getting dressed.

By 8 a.m. I am ready for work, like everyone else. I liaise with Angela [Sheldrick’s daughter and the director of DSWT] to catch up on events, before starting work in my office dealing with the e-mails that have been passed over to me to answer. (All e-mails go to Angela first, who then delegates.)

At 11 a.m. the public visiting hour begins. Items for sale in aid of the orphans are displayed on a table, and the public begins filing in, each paying KSh 500 [about US$5.75]. The fee supports the orphans and [finances] the conservation fee that the Trust is obligated to pay the Kenya Wildlife Service monthly. Local schoolchildren, who come in free of charge (in their hundreds), access the orphans through another pathway at the other side of my home.

The orphans are brought into the compound in front of my house for their noon milk feed and, weather permitting, a mud bath. During that time the public stands behind a cordon in order not to crowd the elephants.

The elephants come in two sittings, the smaller orphans first, followed by the older ones. Each lot spends half an hour at the site so that the visitors can enjoy their antics, which include playing and rolling in the mud, some enjoying a game of football with the keepers, others taking a dust bath, etc.

At noon the elephants leave the compound with their keepers. They are out in the park until 5 p.m., when they return to their night stockades. [At that time] people who have supported the project by fostering one of the orphans are allowed to visit them and watch them being put to bed for the night.

Hanging outside each stockade or stable is a bucket, where the three hourly milk feeds are put throughout the night, [with] one of the keepers assigned to night milk-mixing duty.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

December 6, 2013

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