The Flying Elephant Docs: Fighting The Good Fight

By Vicki Croke

The terrible news about poachers slaughtering Satao, a wild bull elephant in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park whose tusks nearly touched the ground, got a lot of people asking: isn’t there anyone helping these animals? There is.

Elephants must be immobilized in the field in order to be treated. Photo: David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Daphne Sheldrick started rescuing elephant orphans in Kenya more than 50 years ago. And through her organization, The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and cooperating with the Kenya Wildlife Service, she’s expanded her efforts.

She’s got four mobile veterinary units (in addition to eight anti-poaching teams) canvasing vast areas of Kenya parkland, swooping in by plane to immobilize and treat injured elephants.

Planes transport the vets over the vast terrain. Photo: David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

These days, those injuries tend to consist of wounds caused by bullets, spears, snares, and poisoned arrows.

Even baby elephants with no tusks can be killed or injured during an attack, and they are found suffering with all kinds of problems, including leg bones shattered by bullets.

This bull elephant’s leg injuries are treated. Photo: David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

An elephant who is safe one moment can be dead the next. Satao is an example of that. Sheldrick’s mobile vets saw him as recently as May 4. The big elephant was robust as he watched from a distance when vets treated a friend of his who had been shot. But on June 13, it was confirmed that Satao was dead.

Even when found alive, there is no guarantee that injured elephants will survive. Because these are wild animals, they must be immobilized, which means risky sedation out in the open.

This picture illustrates why Tsavo’s elephants are red. Photo: David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

I’ve been to the vast, unbelievably beautiful area of the two Tsavo national parks where you can see for miles in every direction. It’s breathtaking. I’ve seen the “red elephants,” who cover themselves in the region’s rust colored soil. In fact, my most vivid recollection is of sitting in a Jeep near a watering hole and noticing a speck appear on the horizon. It was an approaching bull elephant. He grew more and more massive as he drew closer.  I watched him drink from the watering hole, and watched him still, an hour later as he slowly, slowly, wandered away disappearing once again into the horizon. Free.

Considering the thousands of square miles of these two parks, and the fact that, according to CNN, poaching worldwide has doubled since 2007, it is remarkable how quickly the mobile vet units can reach an animal and how much they can do.

Orphaned baby elephants need to form strong bonds to survive. Photo: David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Sheldrick continues to bring traumatized baby elephants into her care where they are bottle fed every three hours and tended to by a rotating group of caregivers (to prevent them from becoming too attached to just one person).

But a look at her website, gives a detailed picture of the struggle to save elephants in Kenya.

Here, we get a dispatch from the front lines, a compelling list—both uplifting and heartbreaking:

Below is a summary of the elephant cases the KWS/DSWT Veterinary Units have worked on in the month of May alone, each of them special, each of them priceless.  Sadly we have more to report for the month of June.

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