From Orphaned to Cherished: Rescued Newborn Elephant Finds Hope and Love After Heartbreaking Loss 🐘💞✨

Adun, a 2-week-old Bornean pygmy elephant, had managed to get himself trapped in a pond near a palm oil plantation. His feet were stuck in the pond’s muddy bottom, and the harder he tried to free himself, the weaker and more tired he became.

The Wildlife Rescue Unit (WRU) – an animal rescue group based in Sabah, a region in Malaysian Borneo – arrived at the scene. But instead of immediately helping the baby elephant, the teamwaited to see if Adun’s family would return and rescue him themselves. After all, remaining with his elephant family would be the best possible option for Adun.

The rescue team kept an eye on Adun, and waited for a few hours, hoping Adun’s family would come get him. But they never did.

At this point, the WRU stepped in. A team of people pulled Adun out of the pond, loaded him onto a vehicle and drove him to the elephant care unit at Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre.

Elephant rescues are usually quite challenging because of the animals’ weight and size, even though Bornean “pygmy” elephants are smaller than other types of Asian elephants. As a result, they often need to be physically restrained or tranquilized. But this wasn’t the case for Adun.

“He was weak and severely dehydrated,” Laura Benedict, a veterinarian with the WRU, told The Dodo. “Not much effort was made to restrain the elephant during the whole process.”

Unfortunately, Adun’s story is far from unique. Since 2010, the WRU has had to rescue 27 baby Bornean elephants who lost their families.

As in Africa, elephant families in Borneo are often killed for their ivory. But Bornean elephants also face other threats – farmers will kill elephants who come onto their plantations and eat their crops. In the wild, Bornean elephants live in the forest, and they eat grasses, bamboo and fruit. But as more and more forest is torn down for palm oil plantations, elephants will resort to eating crops because they have nothing else.

“They don’t create much damage on mature plantations,” Benoit Goossens, director of the Danau Girang Field Centre, a research and training facility managed by the Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University, told The Dodo. “They mainly eat young shoots, when the palms are newly planted.”

When they do eat crops on plantations, farmers often chase them away with bullets, even though elephants are a protected species in Sabah. Asian elephants, of which Bornean elephants are a subspecies, are classified as endangered.

And when baby elephants lose their families, they often don’t last long on their own. A lot of times, the babies are terminally ill and they die shortly after rescue, Benedict explained. “We recently lost three babies to a deadly virus,” she said.

“In all cases, we find these orphans wandering alone without their mother or group,” Benedict said. “Most logical explanations would be that they were left by their group due to irresponsible or aggressive control measures by humans, or their mothers died due to gunshots.”

The WRU tries to help as many elephants as it can, but the Bornean elephants are facing huge challenges.

There are currently five orphaned elephants being cared for at the WRU’s elephant care unit at the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre – Adun, Budak, Tunku, Dumpas and Danum. Budak is the youngest at 11 months, and Danum is the oldest at 2 and a half years. Coincidentally, all five orphans are males.

But, no matter their ages, they need to be cared for like infants, Benedict said.

“They love rolling on the mud and playing by the pond,” Benedict added. “They slide inside [the pond] whenever it’s too hot or they’re tired playing on the ground.”