Elephants and Chimps

The next morning we headed for another elephant sanctuary, Elephant Whispers. Unlike the David Sheldrick Elephant Sanctuary in Nairobi whose goal was to reintroduce orphaned elephants back into nature, this was a collection of elephants were marked to be culled and instead were sent to Elephant Whispers to be trained for a tourism attraction and other useful purposes.

Culling elephants is another word for mass extermination of a group of animals. Elephants eat almost 300 kilograms of vegetation each day so there is a natural limit to the amount of elephants a park like Kruger can accommodate. During the summer (Nov-Feb) months there is plenty of vegetation but in the winter months (Jun-Aug) the amount of vegetation is drastically reduced leaving elephants foraging for food. When elephants find themselves without enough food they get very destructive and dangerous. This leaves game rangers with the task of reducing the elephant population.

They have tried elephant contraception and vasectomies but it involves darting the elephant from helicopters a huge process that is very costly. They have transported elephants to different areas but elephants are very social animals and they generally have to transport a whole family which is even more costly. So most culling that is done right now is done with a gun. Since elephants are extremely social and a death in a family can create extreme sadness, emotional problems and dangerous animals, they kill the whole family at one time, sometimes as many as 60 are killed in a matter of minutes.
Elephant Whispers is using the elephants to teach the public about these gentle giants and now are training them to track scents. During a visitor’s time they let you feed, ride and inspect the whole anatomy of one of these incredible animals. It is a really cool learning experience. An elephant’s sense of smell is 14 times better then a dog’s and their memory for a scent is incredible.

They do a trick at Elephant Whispers where they allow an elephant to smell 10 to 12 visitors as they hold a hat and say the person’s name. Then they take the hat and throw it on the ground and ask the elephant to take the hat to one of the visitors by using their name. The elephant has associated the name of the person with their scent and picks up the hat and hands it to the correct person.

Louie was telling us he had been to the sanctuary about 6 months before and was back for a visit. When they did this trick while he was there they introduced all the new visitors but left Louie out of the introductions. The groom asked the elephant to take the hat to Louie even though he had only related his scent to his name once, six months before. The elephant picked up the hat and brought it to Louie.

They are starting to use elephants to track poachers. Recently they found a dead rhino in the park and brought in an elephant to track the killers. The elephant went directly to the culprits, even though they had used extreme measure to cover their tracks.

Since an elephant can be ridden across rough terrain this makes it the perfect tracking animal for certain applications. They are teaching them right now to find land mines in war torn African countries.

Who knows you might find one in the airport one day sniffing your luggage; then again maybe not, they do have to eat 300 kilograms of food per day and they leave a huge mess behind them.

We also had the opportunity to visit, Chimp Eden, a Jane Goodall chimpanzee sanctuary. Chimpanzees have 97% of the same genetic makeup that humans do. These guys were amazing to watch as the keepers talked to them like humans and they reacted with very human behavior.

Chimps have become an endangered species because of the deforestation of the African jungles, hunters killing them for bush meat and the pet trade selling them on the black market. There are only about 70,000 chimps left in the world and they are dying at a rate of almost 10,000 a year.

Most of the chimps at Eden were rescued from pet owners who had them locked in small cages in deplorable conditions. Some so badly abused they have brain damage and will never be able to be returned to the wild. You can hear their stories on the Chimps of Eden show on the Animal Planet.