Baby Elephant Lost

This is a picture of a baby elephant trying to wake up its dead mother. She died following translocation to a larger game park in Kenya but baby elephants are orphaned all the time through poaching, illness, natural disaster and accidents (like falling into an open drain and becoming stuck). Thankfully, this baby elephant was rescued by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust which runs a very professional Elephant and Rhino orphanage (which we have added to our list of Charities and you could too!).


I became empassioned about baby elephants after the most traumatic dentist appointment every, this past Tuesday. I went in to my new space-age spa-like dentist for a major filling. It was almost a crown and took about an hour and a half. As they began they turned on the flatscreen TV about the chair and offered me headphones to watch the BBC Life on Earth series. I have seen ads for this on TV and it is truly stunning in HD so I agreed. It was a bad idea.

I have never been good at nature shows. I know that you are always rooting for the underdog. We love the wolf when we have met the wolf pups (with sweet names) and urge the doe to stumble to save the wolf pups from starvation. But come the time we meet the cariboe who struggle on their long migration and we will the evil wolves to tire to let the spindle legged caribou baby find it way back to its mother. After seeing about 10 minutes of one of these shows I am always reduced to trauma and anger (anger that the wildlife photographers and David Attenborough are so manipulative and trauma at the reality of Life Is Suffering while we remain attached to it and our babies.

So, I cope through a few gruesome tragedies until we meet the elephants of the Kalahari desert who make a migration over 100s of miles in the dry season (starving, dying of thirst and assailed by dust storms that blind the little baby elephants) to the okavango delta which floods the desert in the annual rainy season.

We meet a mother and baby who are lost in a dust storm but find their way back. Then the group moves on. But there is another baby elephant who has become disoriented in the dust. He has lost his mother and when the dust settles he cannot see her. Instead, he finds her trail and as we pan back from the helicopter we see him setting out across the vast desert following her footsteps. The voiceover continues "sadly, in this case he is following her footsteps in the wrong direction".

This tragic futility is very very sad. I wanted to rescue the baby elephant and all my feelings of protecting Wren were transferred to protect that lost elephant following the wrong way. I felt Wren was out in the desert and although my mouth was trapped open by that horrible dental contraption my tears ran down under the sunglasses and were wet in my ears.

So, we are now supporting baby elephant orphanages and I am never going to watch those awful nature shows again. And Wren is never going hiking in the Kalahari.