Love, Life, and Elephants by Daphne Sheldrick

( The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust/AFP via Getty Images) Sheldrick with her daughters, Angela Sheldrick (second from left) and Jill Woodley. Her organization, overseen for the past 17 years by her daughter Angela, operates a rhino orphan project, anti-poaching teams and mobile veterinary operations, funded in part by a foster program that lets donors support individual animals. Sheldrick appeared on television programs such as “60 Minutes” and in the 2011 Imax documentary “Born to Be Wild.” She promoted the conservation of rhinos, antelope, buffalo, giraffes and most other animals of the East African savanna. Often described as the first person to hand-rear a newborn elephant, Ms. Sheldrick - after successfully devising a formula for baby rhinos - eventually landed on an ambrosia-like mixture that incorporated coconut oil. The elephant calves bridled at cow’s milk, but Ms.

Sheldrick struggled to develop a formula that approximated their mothers’ in taste and nutrition. Sheldrick focused on rescuing young elephants whose mothers had been speared by ivory hunters.īaby elephants depend on milk until they are about 3, and for 28 years, Ms. While David Sheldrickorganized one of the country’s first anti-poaching units, led early studies of elephant diets and migration, and established a network of all-weather roadways through the park, Ms. Sheldrick created the organization in 1977 and named it for her husband, who had died earlier that year and was the founding warden of Kenya’s largest national park.īefore his death, the couple had worked together to preserve elephants at Tsavo East, a sprawling, untamed preserve of more than 5,000 square miles. The cause was breast cancer, her daughter Angela Sheldrick said in a statement from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Daphne Sheldrick, a Kenyan wildlife conservationist who helped nurse, bathe and occasionally apply sunscreen to more than 230 orphaned elephants, and whose decades of work on their behalf made her one of the world’s foremost champions of a creature she described as a “human animal,” died April 12 in Nairobi.

Love, Life, and Elephants by Daphne Sheldrick