The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘It’s their time to be elephants once again’
Mark Stratton meets the circus animals starting a new life at a Danish safari park
Let me describe a scene that safari buffs will be missing, as much of Africa continues its unfortunate spell in the red zone. Outside my luxurious safari tent, I am draining a G&T at a speed commensurate with the waning daylight. The evening is mild. There is a peachy full moon and, nearby, elephants are rumbling across the grassland, close enough for me to see them ripping up grass with curled trunks and dust-bathing like coiffured aristocrats over-powdering their wigs.
This scene, however, is playing out neither in the Serengeti nor the Masai Mara, but on one of Denmark’s southernmost islands, Lolland, around 80 miles south of Copenhagen.
Knuthenborg Safaripark has not only created Europe’s first elephant safari experience, but is also addressing an urgent need to house these gentle giants as European countries legislate against elephants performing in circuses or languishing in captivity in zoos. Denmark did so back in 2018 and subsequently bought the country’s four remaining circus elephants for €1.6million (£1.36million). The government then sought a facility that could offer them their two essential needs: space and herd companionship.
It’s fair to assume that when Christoffer Knuth’s noble ancestors acquired the Knuthenborg estate in the 1600s and later remodelled it in the 1870s to resemble an English landscape garden, there was little intention of adding elephants to its exotic tree collections. Yet, having converted to a safari park back in the 1960s, they were well placed to receive them.
“The politicians wanted a Danish solution to the problem,” says Knuth, a 13th-generation estate owner and former lawyer, who studied at Oxford. “So we constructed a 14-hectare [35-acre] fenced enclosure – approximately the size of 20 football pitches – to give them as natural a life as possible in retirement.”
The four elephants are African females and arrived here in May 2020. Three of them, Lara, Djungla, and Jenny, all in their 30s, had performed together, while one-tusked Ramboline, who is around 40, arrived from a different circus. All had been wild-born in Africa but snatched from their mothers as babies and sold to Europe.
The 15 en suite safari tents of Knuthenborg’s newly created Camp Ruaha opened in April 2021. The tents are large enough for six adults and raised on wooden platforms just outside the enclosure’s perimeter, close to the elephants’ waterhole.
On my first evening, with a meal selfprepared in my kitchenette, I watch Jenny, a small, tuskless female, larruping chocolatey mud over herself, and snorting with pleasure. If I arrived with scepticism that the commercial operation might impinge on the elephants’ welfare, this is quickly allayed. At ease with their surroundings, the elephants graze contentedly on the rich grass pasture. The local wildlife of Knuthenborg’s deciduous woodlands featuring oak and elm adds a Kafkaesque touch to the experience. Hares and roe deer trigger a safari muscle memory of African spring hares and gazelles.
And sometimes the ladies break branches from the trees to feed on juicy leaves. I watch Christoffer wince seeing parkland oaks planted by his ancestors receiving their avaricious attention. “We put some electric wire around their base, but Ramboline enjoys breaking it,” he says. Ah yes, Ramboline. She’s trouble. I witness her impish side later that day, chasing a recently added zebra herd around the enclosure, á la Keystone
Cops, before giving up after about 400 yards, having run out of puff.
For the most part, Ramboline remains aloof from the other three. “If they want to be by themselves, they have space to do it here,” says Knuth, before remarking upon how their personalities changed almost overnight after arriving. “They were stressed from captivity. They swayed – a behaviour called stereotyping – but within a week this had stopped. Our belief is that they have had a hard life and now it’s their time to be elephants again.”
It seems like a feel-good model worth replicating across Europe, both reputationally and financially. I thought about the suitability of Longleat, say, which is subject to growing criticism for keeping a solitary elephant, Anne – described as Britain’s loneliest elephant. Also, Knuthenborg’s tents cost more than £500 per night and almost fully booked for the next three months. Demand is there.
Guests also spend on food and beverages. The catering team will fill your fridge with food items, including a “grill pack” – featuring wild boar from the estate – for use on a barbecue-unit on your veranda. And on my second night, I visit the Flint House, a Victorian red-brick property built in 1872, where I dine in the adjacent orangery that once held tropical plant collections but is now an upscale restaurant focusing on local produce. My dessert’s strawberries, elderberry cream, and mint oil, are all of Lolland provenance. “Although not the vanilla,” concedes the chef.
To add to the residents typical of safari parks – the likes of giraffe and wildebeest – Knuthenborg recently created a forested enclosure for five tigers rescued from captivity. And more elephants may be on their way.
“We have potential to host eight,” Knuth says, adding he hasn’t ruled out a separate enclosure for Asian female elephants, which cannot be mixed with the African species. But females only. “If we took bull elephants, we would have to make the fence three times stronger.” And with apposite timing during my stay, an African female, Nyoka, arrives from Boras Zoo in Sweden. She is 43 years old and has impressively long pearl-white tusks. The vet, Dr Therese Hard, who accompanies her to Knuthenborg, explains Nyoka is uncomfortable with their zoo’s bull elephant. “We hope she can settle here with females of her age,” she says.
The four resident ladies notice her arrival and it’s utterly moving sharing their excitement. While she adjusts for her new surroundings in a barn, the others pace, sniffing her scent, and trumpeting with anticipation.
Ramboline is so keen to meet the new arrival she damages the electrified fencing trying to get a little closer. Hence the staff decide to allow Nyoka to head into the enclosure with Ramboline for her first taste of relative freedom after an entire life of being zoo-bound. She’s shy and tentative, coyly plucking at the grass, her first ever taste of self-foraged food.
Knuthenborg’s solution for these much-abused creatures makes for an uplifting stay. I leave with Nyoka watching on as Ramboline hurries across the grassland towards Christoffer’s parkland trees. The elephants’ future here seems rosier than the prospects for his mighty oaks.
‘If we took bull elephants, we would have to make the fence three times stronger’