Take a walk on the wild side

摘要

It all began with "Born Free" in 1966, or so it seemed. One moment, Virginia McKenna, ska Joy Adamson, was walking through the bush with Elsa, the lioness the Adamsons wanted to return to the wild. The next, every publisher worth his salt was bringing out books about tousle-headed children growing up in Africa as part of a menagerie of orphaned baby animals: bushbabies, warthogs and dwarf mongeese inevitably named after Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. One couple who epitomised this Eden-ic life was David and Daphne Sheldrick. Born in Alexandria at the height of the British empire, Sheldrick moved to east Africa, becoming first a farmer and professional hunter, and then a game warden and one of the founders of Kenya's national park service. But it was his wife's perseverance in devising a milk formula that would suit baby elephants that turned her into an animal aunt after her husband's early death. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, Kenya's elephants were increasingly threatened by poachers; their babies survived as best they could~or not at all. Daphne Shel-drick's milk formula allowed her lo hand-rear hundreds of elephant orphans.