Tjololo 4th February 2000
Published by Wildcaster 1 year, 11 months ago Tags: africa, animal kingdom, conservation, education, elephants, flickr, GLTP, Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, kill, mala mala, peace parks, photos, predators, teach, wildcasting, wildlife.
4th February 2000
The rain played havoc with us again as we played “yoyo’s” with our rain rain covers. We searched endlessly for Tjololo and found he had eventually returned to his old kudu carcass which he’d left 2 days earlier. Well fed and lethargic he didn’t venture far and spent the rest of the night resting.
It was rather depressing but also encouraging to find an elephant bull that had about 6 inches of its trunk missing but still surviving well, after having adapted to the handicap. He probably lost it in a snare in neighbouring territory where poachers use wire snares to trap game indiscriminately. The unfortunate elephant would have caught his trunk in a snare and pulling to release it, the noose would have tightened. Being made of high tensile wire or cable the trunk can’t stand up to it and is sheared off. Hard to imagine the poor animal having to go through such pain. In Botswana where I worked there were several similar cases where the elephants had lost differing lengths of their trunk. The one in particular had lost almost the entire length of its trunk and other members in the herd were feeding it.
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Kim,do you know what ever became of the elephants you talked about? What a tragic fate for them. But how awesome of the herd to stick by and actually help another member in such a way! You always hear that the weak are left behind. To hear that’s not always true is amazing and makes one take pause and hope for a better tommarrow for the animals! It’s a nice story of the spirit of the elephant! You should tell us more stories like this!
Cheers
Paige
I think all those elephants survived. They just adapt.