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How To Foster A Baby Elephant At The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust In Kenya

How to Foster a Baby Elephant at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya

How to Foster a Baby Elephant at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya.

Over the years, individuals and organizations from all over the world have been helping the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s orphaned animals, rescuing the equivalent of an elephant herd.

The Kenyan Orphans’ Project
To ensure the survival of elephants and rhinos, the charity collaborates with the Kenya Wildlife Service. The young orphans are cared for by a group of committed caretakers who labor around the clock. The infant elephants must be fed every three hours, therefore this critical care is essential to their survival. For the first two years of their existence in the wild, young calves are solely fed their mother’s milk.

The trust’s work with young elephants and rhinos from all around Kenya is still supported by this group effort. After receiving rehabilitation at the Nairobi National Park orphanage, the children are returned to their natural environment. Many of the freed orphans have gone on to procreate in the wild after being sent to southern Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park.

Foster Care

It only costs about R500 (50 USD) a year to foster an orphan! The trust provides you with monthly updates on the orphan’s progress throughout the year, along with pictures and a detailed profile of the animal you are fostering. To keep expenses low, the foster program operates online, providing you with up-to-date information on the orphanage’s newest happenings.How to Foster a Baby Elephant at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya

150 newborn elephants that were orphaned due to poaching, habitat destruction, human-wildlife conflict, and drought have been saved by the organization thus far. The orphans are given names derived from the local tribe or the locations in which they are discovered. The money raised by fostering one of these infant mammals goes directly toward the care of the animal, paying for its food, the keepers’ wages, the veterinarian’s bills, and the orphanage’s operating expenditures.

The age range of the rescued orphans includes older elephants like Eleanor, 51, as well as nursery babies and teenagers.

The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s (SWT) Activities

Dr. Dame Daphne Sheldrick created this reputable wildlife trust in 1977, and it has been in operation for many years. Dame Daphne, who continues to oversee the management of the trust in Kenya, was the first to care for an orphaned baby African elephant.

At the orphanage, keepers tend to the young calves by hand and feed them a milk formula that Dame Daphne created over the course of nearly thirty years. Her career has also made significant contributions to the complicated process of raising elephants and the field of animal husbandry. Visit National Geographic to read Daphne’s call to action.

Restoring the elephants to their natural habitat in Tsavo East National Park, where they will join populations of free-roaming elephants, is the main goal of the wildlife trust’s efforts. It is estimated that the slow process of returning to the wild will take eight to ten years. After rehabilitation, more than 130 rescued elephants were returned to the wild.