I’ll never forget my orphan elephant
I WAS charmed to see the picture in Sebastian Shakespeare’s column (Mail) of Colin Firth and his wife Livia patting a baby elephant at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. The animal sanctuary was founded in 1977 by Daphne Sheldrick in memory of her late husband David. He was the founding warden of Tsavo East National Trust, the wildlife conservation body behind one of the oldest and largest national parks in Kenya. The Sheldricks were pioneers in animal conservation, and the wildlife trust homes orphan elephants and rhino. Dame Daphne died earlier this month, aged 83. I was lucky enough to meet her twice at the wildlife orphanage. As a Christmas present, my husband gave me a year’s sponsorship of Emily, one of the baby elephant orphans. A month later I was on my way to Kenya to meet her. Emily was brought to Daphne at a month old, abandoned by her mother after falling into a refuse pit. In the wild, elephants are dependent on their mother’s milk for their first two years, so Emily, aged 15 months, was being bottle-fed every four hours, drinking 36 pints a day of the special milk formula Daphne had developed. I got there for feeding time at 11am. I’ve heard of pink elephants, but I wasn’t prepared for a red one. In fact, she was red from the mud baths the keepers give the baby elephants to protect their skin from sunburn. Sunscreen is also put on their ears, which are particularly susceptible. The younger ones wear rugs for extra protection — in the wild, they shelter underneath their mothers. When I showed Emily her photograph on the adoption papers, she gripped hold of it with the tip of her trunk, wrenched it out of my hand and hurled it on to the ground! After she was weaned, she was gradually reintroduced into the wild, joining the rehabilitation programme in Tsavo National Park. By the time of my second visit with the actressturned-conservationist Virginia McKenna on a Born Free safari, Emily had given birth to a calf of her own. What a wonderful legacy Dame Daphne Sheldrick has left. ANGELA HUMPHERY,
London nW3.