During visit to Nairobi, Kenya, my best friend and architect Natalie Waters and I had the opportunity to visit the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Centre located in Nairobi National Park. This is the “Nursery” where both orphaned baby elephants and Rhinos are taken after they are rescued. At the Centre they are looked after 24 hours a day and raised by a group of keepers which go to the extent of taking turns sleeping with the orphans in their pens. The emotionally and physically rehabilitated elephants and Rhinos are ultimately re-introduced into the wild in Tsavo East National Park.
The visit inspired me to learn more about elephants and as it turns out, they have an interesting way of communicating. Elephants have an instinctive body language and telepathic abilities. They also communicate with a spoken language that they learn from other elephants, some sounds of which are audible to human hearing, but also communicating over distance with low frequency infrasound hidden to human ears. Additionally, they can detect and interpret seismic sound through their sensitive trunks & feet, a phenomenon which was confirmed when in Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami disaster in Asia, trained elephants in Thailand became agitated and fled to higher ground before the devastating wave struck, thus saving their own lives and those of the tourists riding on their backs.
JAM Language Ltd. is the proud sponsor of MUTARA, an orphaned elephant who arrived at The David Sheldrick Wildlife Centre, July 20th, 2009 as a week old baby and a victim of poaching.
