An Elephant Orphanage in Zambia Struggles Against the Odds

• The ongoing slaughter of Africa’s elephants has left tens of thousands of elephants dead.

Teased out of these numbers are entire families: mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, fathers, and brothers. Some of them, of course, are babies.

In some instances, in fact, it’s the babies the poachers have
specifically targeted. The 2012 poaching rampage inside Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon lasted nearly three months.

Toward the end of the massacre, in which 650 elephants died, Celine Sissler-Bienvenu, of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), surveyed the scene.

She deduced—based on the lacerations she found on some of the calves’ bodies—that the poachers possibly used the babies as “a way for a poacher to be trained on killing elephants. Or, we also think it may have been a tactic: To torture the younger elephants to get the adults to come around. So they [could] kill them all.”

The number of calves that have perished in this current poaching wave is unclear. Also unknown is how many babies survive.

And even if a calf manages to outlive an assault, the chance of that youngster making it in the wild without its mother is negligible.

This past March, a baby elephant did make it through a widely publicized massacre in Chad, which left more than 86 elephants dead, including pregnant females. According to Jenny Webb, cofounder of Wildlife At Risk (WAR), a Netherlands-based organization working to help orphaned wildlife, the calf ran 30 miles away from the massacre site, and then ran 30 miles back—presumably to find his mother.

Despite WAR’s efforts to save the baby, Webb says he died a few days later. “[Before I got to Chad] villagers tried to help him, but unfortunately they gave him cow’s milk, which is a death sentence. The cow’s milk poisoned his system. When I got there, I could tell by just looking into his eyes that his eyes were already dead. He had already given up.”

At some point, each elephant had been traumatically separated from its biological family, so the youngsters have stitched together a new one. “These elephants stay together because they are now living as a family unit,” says Rachael Murton, the project manager of EOP.

“By nature elephants are herd animals. So, even though they were are all initially complete strangers, they’ve formed a surrogate herd, a surrogate family, and they’ve have all become very close to one another.”

Murton, a U.K. native, has been with the Elephant Orphanage Project since its inception in 2007. The nursery—officially called the Lilayi Elephant Nursery—is located just outside the capital city of Lusaka.

Inside the gates, the elephants are kept under the collective eye of a group of human “keepers,” who not only provide the toddlers security but also feed them bottled milk formula every two to three hours around the clock.