Baby Elephants!

This weekend was pretty fun. While my roommates headed to Mombasa, I stayed here and had a few adventures of my own. Saturday morning, I decided to try and go to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Centre. Sheldrick is a conservation group that rescues orphaned elephants and rhinos, raises them by hand, and then releases them into the wild as adults. When I set out looking for it, all I knew about the location was that it is in Karen, which is an almost entirely white suburb (and was once the home of Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa). I also knew that it was supposedly on Magadi Road, and that it is accessible by matatu, which was how I planned to get there. Unfortunately, once I got to town, all of the matatus there seemed never to have heard of it. Each bus I approached pointed me in a different direction. Eventually I just decided to get on a matatu heading towards Karen and see what happened.

As we headed towards Karen, I saw nothing that said “this is where the baby elephants are” to me. So eventually when I saw some signs for the A.F.E.W. Giraffe Centre, I decided I would just go there instead. Especially since by this time it was 11:45, and there was no point in trying to go to Sheldrick, since it’s only open from 11 am until 12 pm every day. So I hopped out of the bus and headed towards the sign. It turned out the sign was maybe about ¾ of a mile from the entrance to the Centre, but eventually I got there. It was really cool – the Centre rescues Rothschild’s giraffes, then trains them to help people by impersonating doctors, lawyers, teachers, or police officers.

Just kidding. The Centre raises these giraffes, which are extremely rare in the wild – partially because they just don’t have a very extensive range, and partially because they were almost hunted to extinction by a Ugandan dictator who had his army use them for target practice. The Centre is basically responsible for saving the Rothschild’s giraffe from extinction by releasing mating pairs back into national parks. At the Centre, you can get really close to the giraffes – guides hand out food pellets that visitors can directly feed to the animals by placing the pellets on the giraffe’s long black tongue. I also saw one guy “kiss” a giraffe by putting a pellet between his lips and then letting a giraffe take it from him. Gross.

After I was done at the A.F.E.W. Centre, I went back to town, where I got stuck in a horrendous traffic jam. I finally got out of the bus and walked because we had gone about a quarter of a mile in half an hour. By the time I got home, I was very, very tired.

Sunday I woke up early, determined to actually get to Sheldrick. I had called the night before to find out what matatu would actually take me there, and the guy told me that 125 went past the center. So I went to town, found matatu 125, and asked the guy to tell me when to get off. When he did, I climbed out, only to discover that I was at the front entrance to Nairobi National Park. While Sheldrick is adjacent to the park, it’s not accessible from there. Even I knew that. So I asked the guard at the entrance how to get to Sheldrick, and he told me that 125 was right, but that I needed to ask to get off at Central Workshop on Magadi Road (the park is on Langata Road). So I went and waited for another matatu to come by, and this time I was actually dropped at Central Workshop. From there, I had to walk for about 20 minutes through part of the park to get to Sheldrick. But I finally arrived at 10:15, which meant that I had to wait for 45 minutes before they would let me in.

That wasn’t too bad though – I talked to a bunch of people who were also waiting, and met a German woman who offered me a lift to Yaya after we left the park. That was great, because Yaya shopping center is right by my apartment. But then it was time to see the baby elephants!

This was an incomparably awesome experience. While baby elephants are not soft and furry, they are totally adorable. First the young ones, 18 months and under, came out and had their bottles from the keepers. Then they got some time to run around and play. Baby elephants are pretty rambunctious – they throw dirt around, kick soccer balls, and wrestle with each other. Several times one of them would push up against the rope that was separating the spectators from the animals, and once one of them stepped on my foot. I got to touch several of them, and one even let me pet his trunk. That was pretty great, I have to say. After that, the older group, who are between 18 months and 3 years, came out and had their bottles. These elephants are much bigger and stronger than the little ones, but similar in behavior. Luckily none of them stepped on me.

The elephants are being raised by Sheldrick because they have been found orphaned in the wild. Baby elephants are typically not adopted by others in the herd if their mother dies, so they would die too. Many of their mothers die due to poaching, habitat destruction, or other human interference. Sheldrick rescues them and raises them until they are old enough to be released back into the wild, where they can rejoin a herd.

Overall, I had a really great weekend. I got to touch a bunch of wild animals, which was totally cool. It was an experience I could never replicate in the US where conservationists are much stricter about prohibiting people from interacting with animals. Although it’s true that there could be negative repercussions from the animals interacting with humans too much, I think that as long as the groups here feel that the animals they have rescued have not been harmed by the human interaction, this was a pretty awesome experience.