Love, Life, and Elephants by Daphne Sheldrick

But Daphne and David Sheldrick did not give in to the crush of the world’s deadly greed. Subsequent decades brought machine-gun wielding strike teams to the Kenyan wilderness which indiscriminately destroyed entire families in a matter of minutes, such that by 1990 the elephant population that had once stood at two hundred and seventy thousand individuals was reduced to less than twenty thousand.įor sixty long, weary years it was the self-appointed task of one married couple to stand against the slaughter and fight with all their resourcefulness and compassion against a boundlessly cruel system which offered them repeated, grizzly failures of such pervasive scope that cynicism and surrender would have been forgiven them. She is fortunate in one respect only – her death comes in the 1970s, when poachers were limited by available technology to the murder of one animal at a time. She has been shot by a team of poachers who need simply wait until she collapses from the pain in order to descend upon her still living form en masse, and rip the valuable ivory tusks from her face to sell to an Asian market that will fashion them into trinkets.

A mother elephant staggers forward, arrows protruding from her flank and legs, poison coursing through her blood that is attacking her muscles and making every step ahead an exercise in pure chemical agony.

Love, Life, and Elephants by Daphne Sheldrick