Two elephants in Zimbabwe are in life-threatening situations as you read this. Each has fallen victim to cruel wire snares – torture devices that cut dangerously deep into the flesh, cause severe tissue damage and likely leave the animal in agony.
The elephants – members of two separate herds roaming the vast Lake Kariba region – were spotted by our partner, the Bumi Hills Anti-Poaching Unit (BHAPU), and the team they are working with, Kariba Animal Welfare Fund Trust (KAWFT). One of the animals is an eight-year-old female with a snare around her ear and tusk, while the other is a calf – estimated to be just a year old – who has a snare wound tightly around its back leg and probably causing great pain.
Already, the snare has caused significant damage to the elder elephant: there is a terrible wound behind her ear where the snare is embedded, affecting its use and causing the ear to collapse forward.
If these elephants are not rescued and treated SOON, they could suffer life-altering injuries, be captured by predators, or die as a result of infection. We need your help right now – and here is why…
To help these animals, our team must dart and tranquilize them first – but the elephants are extremely difficult to target from the ground. They are wild, elusive, and largely hidden in the vast, densely wooded area they are roaming.
The most effective way to dart them, therefore, will be from above. Our team urgently needs to charter a helicopter and pilot so they can spot the animals from the sky and dart them, but they cannot fund this alone. And this is where we need your help as fast as possible.
A helicopter approach is the safest way to track and dart the injured, skittish elephants. Trying from the ground means being attacked by an irate mother who does not know we are there to help and will kill to protect her injured calf. To save the calf, a helicopter is the only option we need help to hire one.
Your support right now could be the difference between life and death for these snared animals – integral members of their herds. Elephants live in tightly bonded, female-led herds, and the death of this individual would devastate the herd. Elephants have been proven to grieve their dead, and if it is the matriarch who dies, the herd may dissolve.
We anticipate that the other elephants in the herds will try to protect their kin from human interference, which means our team must execute the rescue with military precision and the highest level of care.