Elephant, Love

Mary Baures, C.A.S.'86, adopted Loijuk, her first orphaned elephant, in 2006. The baby was about six months old when she was found wandering alone in northern Kenya, emaciated and weak. The area's severe drought had taken a toll on much of the wildlife, and rescuers from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi didn't know if they could save her. By then, liquid from her lungs had begun to seep dangerously into her tiny trunk. She wouldn't take milk — an essential part of a baby elephant's diet for several years.

"Things did not look promising at all," rescuers reported. But then something amazing happened: Other orphaned elephants living temporarily at the center offered help.

"They wrapped their trunks around her," Baures says, explaining that this elephant equivalent of a hug is the kind a mother would have given. And it actually made a difference: Loijuk responded and in time made a full recovery.

Baures, a psychologist who specializes in helping people recover from trauma, says she learned something important that spurred her to write her new book, Love Heals Baby Elephants: Elephants grieve and bounce back in ways similar to traumatized humans.

"Elephants are kindred spirits," she writes. Like humans, they show empathy as she witnessed with the orphans reaching out to help others in distress. Elephants throw tantrums and get jealous. They also thrive in families. "For an elephant," she says, "family is all-important."

Unfortunately, not all of the orphaned babies make it. "Some are just too compromised when rescued," she says. "Others with minor wounds still die because they give up after watching the massacre of their famiily by poachers." Since she first adopted Loijuk, there has been a dramatic increase in poaching and a free fall in the elephant population. "The 10 million elephants of a century ago have dropped to less than 300,000," she says, in large part because poachers kill adults for their tusks, leaving behind vulnerable babies. Only about 3 percent of baby elephants survive when orphaned by poachers.

Luckily, Loijuk is now part of a group of ex-orphans living back in the wild, orphans who remember those who saved them, who return on their own to the wildlife sanctuary in Nairobi to help.

"Loijuk is like someone who goes away to college," Baures says. "She comes home to interact with the younger orphans and helps charge wild dogs when they get too close."

How else do resilient baby elephants compare with resilient people? Baures says:

• They grieve. She saw baby elephants sleeping next to the dead bodies of their mothers.
• They help others. She says, "They feel whole again by adding their strength to another."
• Both groups learn to adapt. "As a result of being without a herd, orphaned elephants allow other lone elephants to join them. This," she says, "is not typical of elephant society.