LET’S STEP AWAY awhile from our own society’s chaotic divisions. I know a orphanage in Africa, to adapt Karen Blixen‘s famous opening sentence. It’s for young elephants, and it’s one of the many, though not enough, that are scattered across the continent.
This one is run by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and it’s Kenyan, situated in the region of Tsavo where I first got acquainted with elephants nearly 50 years ago.
I’m leery about using anthropomorphic language to discuss these extraordinary, majestic creatures. It’s the bane of far too much wildlife writing, especially for TV. I’ll limit myself to just mentioning some basic and undeniable parallels between these creatures and humans.
They have about the same lifespan as ourselves. They reach sexual maturity in their teens. They bear offspring who need close care and rearing in their earliest stages of life, since the babies are incapable of surviving independently without a parent-figure. They lose their teeth in old age, including their special adaptation of teeth, their tusks. They are among the few species whose highly developed brains can recognize themselves in a mirror, just like us. One other feature in common is not often mentioned. We can both be divided into ‘lateralities’; there are right-tusked and left-tusked elephants, just as there are right- and left-handed people, and sometimes you might meet a totally ambidextrous elephant as well.
But one commonly proclaimed likeness between our two species might be breaking down these days. Elephants are, and remain, striking examples of deep social cohesion. And humans? Well, that’s of course questionable.
I was touched by some recent news from the Sheldrick operation. It concerns a teenage female elephant named Lenana. She was born in the wild, but lost her mother to disease when she was tiny. Mercifully she was rescued by the Sheldrick team, who found her alongside her mother’s dead body.
Lenana was raised first in the nursery of the Sheldrick orphanage and then, as she grew, in the Integration Unit that Sheldrick runs in northern Tsavo, before she was finally sent off to an independent life back in the wild. While under Sheldrick care she had played a dedicated role caring for her younger fellow-orphans, and in the wild she continued doing the kind of nannying that young females traditionally provide for their herd’s youngsters.
The news this Fall about Lenana was that she had become a mother herself – to a boisterous young male. He’s been given the name Lapa (‘Moon’ in the local Samburu language) to mark his appearance during a lunar rising. In a move typical of the ongoing social exchange that takes place between the Sheldrick compound and the wide-open territory outside, Lenana had brought Lapa, accompanied by a crowd of her contemporaries and elders, to show him off back in the place she herself had grown up.
Probably unaware of his pint-sized stature, Lapa repeatedly makes trouble for the young nannies (above), notably a pair of three-year-olds, Siku and Kama, who almost compete with each other for the chance to watch over him. Exercising the patience of nannies everywhere, they take all his antics in stride. But just in case they might get overindulgent of his mischief, Kama’s mother, Kinna is on hand to administer discipline, with an admonishing kick when needed. Lapa’s mother, Lenana herself, had to step in at one point to retrieve him from a watering-trough he’d managed to climb and fall into.
ALL THIS NEWS CAME to me from the Trust’s CEO, Angela Sheldrick, daughter of the late wildlife authority David Sheldrick, who was founding Warden of Tsavo National Park during my earliest elephant days. She’s been understandably moved by the story of Lenana and Lapa. “Motherhood is a milestone for any elephant,” she says, “but especially for our orphans. After all, their very existence is miraculous – fate took them from their own families years ago.” With skillful help from Sheldrick staff, added to all the innately collaborative efforts of the elephants themselves, “they now have been able” says Angela, “to reclaim their place in the wild. Having a calf of their own is the culmination of their reintegration journey.”
As we humans a continent away are reeling from a season of deep divisiveness and acrimony, I’m finding it heartening to learn from Kenya about such dedicated unity of purpose.
In a horrible contrast, our supposedly advanced society has in recent times seen our official gatekeepers, in direct contravention of judicial orders, in effect make orphans of young children, by forcibly separating them from their parents. All at the deliberate instigation of that society’s topmost leader. Maybe with that leader’s departure, we can now step back toward standards that we might call more ‘humane’, but in this case have been better upheld in the animal kingdom.
A new book out soon digs deeper into that comparison between species. It comes from an animal behavior expert who concentrates on elephants, and whose work I’ve highlighted before. She’s Caitlin O’Connell of Stamford University, and the book is Wild Rituals: Lessons Animals Can Teach Us About Connection, Community, and Ourselves (from Chronicle Prism Books).
O’Connell offers more subtlety and nuance than I can, but her book simply reaffirms for me an old axiom (apt in both human and animal contexts) that was often used by a US presidential contender who won the popular but not the Electoral College vote. You know it. The message is that “It takes a village” to raise a youngster – and of course it’s borrowed from an African proverb.
