Walking with Elephants

We journeyed along the Garden Route when we left Cape Town to reach Nature’s Valley where we stayed at a lodge called Wild Spirit. We had met Jenny, the owner of the lodge, on our first day in Cape Town and heard from many fellow travelers it was a great place to stay with lots of hikes and animal sanctuaries nearby. Jenny told us that she worked out a 50% discount for her guests to have the elephant experience at the nearby The Crags Elephant Sanctuary and immediately we knew we had to venture westward in order to get up close with an African Elephant.

The elephant experience is one of the most amazing things either of us has ever done. In order to use the discount, we had to do the first one in the morning, which is perfect since fewer people come in for that and we ended up sharing our time with a family of four. This enabled each of us to have more time with the three elephants that spent the hour with us.

The experience begins with a brief informative lesson on the elephants living at the sanctuary.There are three from Botswana who were confiscated at the Johannesburg airport while en route to Russia to become circus “performers;” they didn’t have the proper paperwork. The other three elephants come from Namibia where they were rescued from being killed as they were wandering into territory that was not friendly toward having elephants (we can’t recall if it was farmland or a park). The group consists of five females and one male whose ages range from 11 years (the male) to 19. African Elephants have a life expectancy of over 70 years, so they are similar to humans in that respect and these were teenagers! They were at about half their full size (full is 5-6 tons for males and 4-5 tons for females). While the females are ready to mate at age 15, males do not mature until 20, so there is no mating at this sanctuary. Ultimately, they plan to re-release these elephants to the wild by incorporating them into a private game park. Considering they are becoming extremely comfortable with human contact and accustomed to being fed treats, we wonder a bit how their re-entry will work, but a private game park will have some feeding involved we think. We are only familiar with the public parks method of having the animals live completely as they do naturally with little or no human interference.

After our lesson, the three female Botswana ellies were brought to the meeting area where we would soon meet them. All six had been grazing on the grass while we had our lesson and then two of them stopped for a quick drink from the watering hole on their way to meet us. It was fascinating just to be that close to them, but the day got even better when we physically met. We were split into two groups of 3 (the family got split up, but we thought we should all get split up so partners could take pictures of each other! Luckily a very kind guide offered to take our camera to get some photos of us walking the elephants) and then assigned an elephant. We were in the second group so waited as the first took their elephants for a short stroll around our meeting area. Next it was time to enter the forest and we were introduced to our elephant (ginnie was with Jahma, which means love, but we can’t remember Anthony’s) and told to stand to the front left and hold our right hand behind us. The elephants put their trunks in our hands (mine, who Anthony walked on the way out, prefers to have us hold in the nostril which meant a lot of heavy breathing right on our hands!). We walked for a few moments before reaching a clearing. The walk was incredible, a 2.5-3 ton elephant trusted us to hold her trunk, while we trusted her to walk carefully. We also discovered that elephants walk quickly and have a lot of power to their forward movement, so perhaps leading is not a proper description, but being pushed along would fit the bill J. Jahma is the only elephant of the group with no tusks (due to a genetic birth defect).

In the woods, the elephants demonstrated some of their natural behaviors. Their guide gave a command and each showed a different ability: kneeling, blowing air, and shaking their heads. All are done in the wild and signify individual messages or needs. It was really fascinating! We then each had time one-on-one with an elephant to learn more about it and it’s physiology. We felt their thick, rough, bristly-haired skin, got a close-up look at their molars, felt the pads of their feet, and held the plastic-like bristles of their tails. These elephants cannot feel with their skin because it is 2 inches thick, so the bristle hairs are how they sense the world through touch. Their tongues never leave their mouths and they use their trunks to gather their food and bring it to their mouth by wrapping it around the morsel and holding on. To drink, they can fill their trunks about 1/3 of the way full (there is a biological mechanism that stops the water from going further so it doesn’t get into their airway and choke them) and then they empty it into their mouths or spray it on themselves to get cool.

We always fed our elephants in order to thank them for letting us walk with them and pet them and observe them so closely. We were giving them a pellet that has nutrients they need and would get from their 16-hours of grazing in the bush. We returned to the original meeting space by again holding trunk-in-hand and then said our farewells. The two young girls with us took the additional elephant-back ride so we joined their parents in waiting so we could have our final lesson.

During the final lesson, we learned more about the anatomy and life of the African Elephant. Here are some more interesting facts: their molars are smooth compared to the Asian Elephant because of their grass/leaf-based diet (whereas the Asian Elephant needs jagged molars for its bamboo-based diet), a female elephant’s gestation period is 22 months and she stays with her calf for 5 years and does not have another baby until one calf is independent, elephants can have about 8-10 babies in their life (being mammals, they have a limited number of eggs in the ovaries), elephants live in family groups but the males leave the herd at 15 to live a bachelor’s life (often finding a bachelor herd; it’s fascinating that they have the instinct that to reproduce they must leave the herd as they would want the best chance of healthy offspring and survival and not the genetic defects that come from incestuous groups), elephants walk on their toes (like cats and dogs and other 4-legged mammals) and have a special fatty padding that develops around them to give them the wide area on which to step and balance their weight on the ground, all elephants have tusks and they are either right- or left-tusked (by looking at the tusks you can see which has more wear and which side the elephant prefers), you can tell a female from a male by the thickness of the trunk (a female’s is thinner).

The elephant experience prepared us for our upcoming trip to Addo Elephant National Park where we would take our first safari in a park whose initial purpose was to protect the last remaining (and extremely endangered) herd of elephants and help increase their numbers (they began with 200 and now have around 470) as well as maintain a natural, protective environment for many African wild animals. We’ll share those experiences in another post.

Until then, enjoy the elephants and stay well!

ukuthula na-uthando!