Yesterday afternoon at 2.30 we received an urgent call from a nearby farm, Embori that borders the Mt. Kenya Forest Reserve, reporting an elephant that had fallen into a pit latrine and was totally stuck. The exhausted elephant was surrounded by local community farmers, who were threatening to kill the animal for meat.

Ian, Richard and co. flew to the farm to try and rescue the elephant. We also sent a Land cruiser, kindly donated by WSPA, with lots of heavy duty slings and ropes, kindly donated by Martin Bucher at Zurcher Tierschutz.

The elephant, a male about 20 years old, was lightly sedated and then the slings were maneuvered into place to enable a tractor to attempt to pull him out from the pit. The Elephant, now named "Smelly", was slowly but surely pulled free from the pit amidst huge puffs of black smoke coming from the tractor as its wheels spun.

Sometime later, the very tired Elephant managed to recover and get up and disappeared back into the forest where he had come from.



We also had another white rhino calf born on the Conservancy. Jakwai gave birth to her third calf on the 18th of July. Both mother and calf are doing great. This brings the total number of rhinos on Lewa to 41 black and 37 white.