Trunks full of love
Pamela Wade is the proud foster mum of an orphaned baby elephant after an enchanting encounter at a Kenyan wildlife trust.
What do Donald Trump, Ellen DeGeneres and three dozen orphaned elephants have in common? On the face of it, very little, but when it was recently announced that the US would be lifting its ban on the import of elephant hunting trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, the global outcry snapped these three elements together under the Twitter hashtag #BeKindToElephants.
Horrified by this additional threat to African elephants, which are already being killed by poachers at the rate of 100 a day — that’s one every 15 minutes — Ellen promised, for every retweet, to make a donation to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya.
The publicity led to a flurry of interest in the organisation; and even now that Trump has reinstated Obama’s ban, happily the donations continue.
Located on the outskirts of Nairobi, by the National Park that skirts the city, the Trust’s carpark begins to fill every day at about 10.30am. Locals, tourists, families, school parties, couples and solo travellers — as well as, on the day I visit, three members of the New Zealand team in the city for the World Scrabble Championship — we’re all here to have our hearts simultaneously warmed, and broken.
At 11am, the gate opens and we pour through the buildings to a roped-off area out the back, where bare ground surrounds a shallow muddy pond. Head Keeper Edwin Lusichi greets us as we gather, and keeps up a running commentary throughout the hour, giving us the background information and urging us passionately never to buy ivory or any other product that encourages poaching.
Then he introduces us to the stars of the show. He’s briefly drowned out by the universal cooing that’s sparked by the arrival of the first entrant: a small elephant, the essence of cuteness, little ears flapping as it runs towards us out of the trees, making a beeline for a keeper holding a big bottle of milk formula.
It’s one of 17 members of the baby herd: altogether, 34 elephant orphans are currently being cared for at the Trust, all of whom would otherwise have died if left out in the wild. Edwin tells us the history of each elephant as they all crowd around the pond, seeking out the keeper with their feed. There’s Enkesha, who was found with her trunk almost severed by a wire snare set for antelope: she’s just 18 months old, and the nasty wound is clearly visible, although Edwin assures us it’s healing.
Sattao was rescued at only three months old, found thin and alone, wounded by predators, his mother presumably poached — now he’s a bouncy one-year-old, great friends with Luggard, who was spotted with a leg badly broken by poachers’ bullets. Maktao too was three months old when, found alone and severely dehydrated, he was helicoptered to the Trust just six months ago.
Edwin continues with the desperately sad back-stories — mothers poached, or killed by