Pachyderm party
Lulu gets elephant cake for her 57th birthday at PAWS
Lulu weighs 8,200 pounds, stands 8 feet tall from her front feet to the top of her head, and she got a specially-made cake for her estimated 57th birthday celebration Friday at the Performing Animals Welfare Society sanctuary outside San Andreas.
Lulu is a female southeast African elephant first captured in 1968 in Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, and she was a captive resident of San Francisco Zoo from age 2 years old to 38 years old. She was rescued by PAWS and moved to the nonprofit organization’s sanctuary outside San Andreas in March 2005.
“Considering her circumstances, that she had a life of captivity before she came to us, at 57 she’s old for an elephant in the wild,” said Dr. Chris Draper, 47, of Murphys, who is chief operations officer at PAWS the past two years and is originally from Hampshire, England.
At the same time, 57 years “is not old for an elephant in the wild,” said Draper, who has visited wild elephants in Africa in their natural habitats. “African elephants still breed into their 60s. In the wild she would still be in her prime, and she’d live well into her late 60s, so long as poachers wouldn’t go after her.”
At Friday’s birthday bash, Priscilla Chalmers, a PAWS volunteer, said she used wheat bran, carrots, apple sauce, flour, grapefruit, and zucchini to make special cakes for Lulu and Toka, a 53-year-old female African elephant who shares space with Lulu.
“I’ve visited areas where elephants like Lulu should live,” Draper said. “Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa. That’s where she should be. She should not be in Calaveras County. We’re glad she’s here, but she should have a life in the wild.”
Lulu may weigh more than four tons, about the same as a Toyota Tacoma, but she still gets around. Around 11 a.m. she was up on a hill in her enclosure at the PAWS sanctuary. By 1 p.m. she and Toka were back down by one of her enclosure’s fences, responding to PAWS staff who brought food for the elephants.
People with PAWS, including volunteers, supporters, donors, board members, staff, and Ed Stewart, 71, a cofounder of PAWS, celebrated Friday as Lulu’s 57th birthday with “Lulu Luv” cookies, cupcakes, and vegetarian burgers served on a hilltop overlooking the 2,300 PAWS
sanctuary, which is set up for elephants, tigers, bears, African lions, mountain lions, and other captive animals.
Nancy Hair, 74, of Sebastopol, and Joann Levy, 81, of Sutter Creek, were among longtime supporters of PAWS who came to celebrate Lulu’s special day.
Hair said she first learned about PAWS when she read an article in a Bay Area newspaper in the 1990s and decided to visit the PAWS sanctuary in Galt. Then she read a book by PAWS cofounder Pat Derby, “The Lady and Her Tiger,” and she’s been actively supporting PAWS ever since.
Levy said she wrote a book, “They Saw the Elephant,” about women and the Gold Rush, and she met Hair at the PAWS San Andreas sanctuary about 10 years ago.
The people who founded PAWS set it up to rescue abused, neglected, retired, and needy captive wildlife through intervention and legislation. To raise funds the nonprofit hosts periodic See the Elephants Saturdays and other events.
Included in Lulu’s birthday celebration Friday was the ceremonial presentation of a $20,000 check to the Kenya-based Amboseli Trust for Elephants, which is both a Kenyan trust and a nonprofit organization in the United States. Amboseli Trust goals include research of elephants and ecosystems in Amboseli National Park, promoting knowledge, awareness, and elephant conservation.
Lulu’s homeland, Eswatini, is a landlocked nation in southern Africa, bordered by Mozambique on the northeast and by South Africa on the north, west, south, and southeast.
According to the Nairobi-based Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, one of the oldest wildlife charities in Africa, African elephants are known as Loxodonta africana to scientists, conservation status is endangered for savanna elephants and critically endangered for forest elephants, and there are an estimated 400,000 to 415,000 African elephants left in the wild. A century ago there were around 12 million African elephants, according to Worldwildlife.org.
Worldwide there are 15,000 to 20,000 elephants living in captivity and circumstances for most of them are abysmal, according to support groups like Elephantvoices.org, the Elephant Advocacy Project, and others.
African elephants can be found in Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
For more information about Lulu and other elephants that live at the PAWS sanctuary outside San Andreas, visit www.pawsweb.org/meet_elephants.html, and for more about PAWS itself go to www.pawsweb.org.