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Shot elephant rescued in Kenya

Posted: 25 May 2011 03:27 AM PDT

Dear Friends,

The ivory trade is once again threatening Kenya’s elephant herds. This video has some shocking images, but a happy ending.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

After seeing the ivory seized in Nairobi Airport, several people have been asking where the ivory is coming from. Afterall, there is no poaching epidemic is there?

Well, on Friday night during a visit to the newly established Galana Conservancy, we heard that six gunshots had been heard a few days earlier, and that there was an injured elephant somewhere in the area. On Saturday we went out to look for him, and found him at 8 am. A large 35 – 40 year old bull elephant with impressive ivory, but a shortened trunk. He clearly  had suffered from an old snare injury that had cut the end of his trunk off. He was standing hunched over, in extreme pain. We could see a weeping wound on his side that seemed  entirely consistent with gun shot wound.  We could see the entry and exit wound of the bullet.

As we watched him he leaned on bushes and sat on an ant hill, he seemed to be suffering so much that he hardly noticed our presence.  He wasn’t eating but moved from bush to bush and rubbed his distended belly against the ant hill.

We immediately called the KWS but unfortunately the local veterinarian had returned to Nairobi. Then the injured elephant collapsed. Convinced he would die if he remained lying down, we revved the car engines and he stood up again and continued staggering about.

However, upon hearing about the condition of the animal, KWS took a strong decision and flew the vet back to the area about 2 hours east of Nairobi in the dry plains of Galana.

Unfortunately due to poor weather, the vet did not arrive until early afternoon, it was so hot that the elephant had moved down to the water and was not in a position to be darted. We decided to wait for him to come back out of the water. We left one person to watch him while we went off to investigate a “bad smell”.

Sure enough, the bad smell that emanated from within a dense salt bush area, was a dead elephant.  It’s face was reduced to a mass of bones and maggots, the rest of the body revealed a massive old bull – much bigger than the injured one. Initially the KWS rangers believed the cause of death to be a poisoned arrow. This area is notorious for the  use of native plants to procure poison for killing elephants. Howver, the hacked face was inconsistent with a traditional method of killing an elephant. The poiosoning of elephants leads to a slow paralyzing death and the elephant will be followed for days by the hunter who would leave the carcass to rot for a few weeks before removing the ivory. In this case the elephant ivory had been removed immediately using axes and the entire body of the elephant covered with green bushes. The condition of the cut bushes revealed that the elephant had been dead for no more than 2 or 3 days – about the time that the six gunshots were heard. We found the trunk some meters away from the body of this elephant, and to our dismay, his trunk was also shortened. That was when Garry recognized the pair of bulls that usually hung out together. Both had shortened trunks, and one had much larger ivory than the other. This one named Kulalu had the larger ivory. The KWS vet Jeremiah examined the carcass and concluded that it was consistent with a gunshot wound.

So we had two elephants shot in the last 3 days. And then another pair of ivory tusks were recovered from another elephant carcass that appeared to be a natural death – however, judging from the size of the ivory, it is likely that this was not a natural death but another victim of poaching who died in a place and the poachers failed to find him.

These three deaths suggest to me that there is a level of poaching in Kenya that we are not aware of. Were it not for the smell of the dead elephant so close to the houses, this dead elephant may not have been detected.

Finding carcasses in this part of Kenya is difficult, the terrain is vast and bushy and It is easy to hide the carcasses.

After darting him the KWS vet treated the entry and exit wounds of the elephant which involved turning him over – a task that required much manpower and a landrover.

After he was cleaned up the vet gave him 70% chance of survival and injected the antidote but the elephant would not get up. After about 15 minutes of trying unsuccessfully to get up, the KWS tied a rope to one of his tusks and pulled it with the landrover. This got the elephant up very fast – whereupon we discovered that he was wide awake and extremely angry. He charged his rescuers, nearly toppled one vehicle and then ran down to the river. I covered this story on twitter as it was happening and we videoed and tape recorded the entire sequence which will come out soon.

Now, 24 hours after the incident, the elephant now named Atiki, is fine and is feeding comfortably a few kilometers from where we darted him.
 
Video at:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_l5AJBpTU