VIDEO: BABY ELEPHANT ESCORTS MAN TO A HERD OF BULL ELEPHANTS

Transcript by Care2 and Video by National Geographic

Investigative journalist Bryan Christy is working hard to expose the ivory trade and raise awareness about the plight of Africa’s elephants who are being slaughtered at a staggering rate for their ivory. It’s almost incomprehensible that these iconic animals could disappear from the landscape forever within our lifetime if drastic action isn’t taken to stop poachers.

Occasionally we get reminders about the urgency of this issue when we hear stories about the intelligence and socially complex nature of elephants, and get glimpses into their lives in the wild. This week National Geographic shared a short clip from its documentary series Explorer: Warlords of Ivory showing Christy on a trip to Kenya where he visited orphans at the Ithumba Release Camp in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park. This is where orphans who are cared for by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust begin their reintegration into the wild.

There, these orphans escort him to meet a herd of wild elephants who he admits can be extremely dangerous, adding that there’s a good chance he’d be seriously injured if he approached them on his own. With the baby elephants as his chaperones, however, he says he feels safe, adding, “They are protecting me, whether they know it or not.”



Christy said the experience “reestablishes my belief that these animals live in a society we barely understand. And I don’t have any greater right or lesser right to be on this planet, to have my community than these elephants do.” Unfortunately, not everyone sees elephants, or our place in the world, this way and poachers continue to threaten the future survival of these amazing animals. We continue to hear stories about the deaths of well-known and beloved individuals, entire families and, possibly most heartbreaking, more stories about orphans whose world’s are tragically changed forever by human greed.

Christy, meanwhile, is trying to crack the ivory trade. Recently he embarked on an effort to expose the criminals involved by tracking the exact route ivory is taking through Africa to its end destination by getting fake tusks embedded with a tracker into the market. His work will be featured as the cover story in the September issue of National Geographic. For more info about Christy’s work, check out Explorer: Warlords of Ivory. To learn more about how to help orphaned elephants and stop the ivory trade check out the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and iworry.org.