July 2020 - AES would like to take you to Sri Lanka, where for over 4 years, we have worked closely with Dr. B. Vijitha Perera supporting the care of orphaned elephants at Elephant Transit Home (“At Athuru Sevana”) in Udawalawe National Park. Elephant Transit Home’s goal is to rehabilitate orphaned elephants and release them back into the wild at the age when they can care for themselves. In a country with approximately 6,000 wild elephants, Elephant Transit Home has taken in hundreds calves in the last 25 years. This is a challenging task, as these young elephants often come with serious nutritional deficiencies, disease and a host of other issues.
Previously, our funding for ETH has gone to monitoring the youngsters while in human care and then upon release. But our most recent partnership is centered on community partnership, specifically with school children.
Orphaned for a variety of reasons, as we see in almost every elephant range territory, Human Elephant Conflict is a major factor for these calves. In an effort to gain community support, Dr. Perera has written and distributed two books, which Asian Elephant Support is proud to have sponsored. One of which, A Cry for Milk - written in Sinhala and translated to English - talks about the reasons why calves are separated from their mothers, the extraordinary care given when these elephants come to Elephant Transit Home and the success stories this group has seen after the release of juveniles back into the wild and the joy of them finding new herds and having babies of their own.
Sharing these stories with school children, cultivating a sense of concern for orphaned calves and understanding for lengths taken to save these babies, was the purpose behind A Cry for Milk. Sixty pages of information and photos from Elephant Transit Home’s amazing work, fills this book. Asian Elephant Support is so thankful for the opportunity to fund the effort to develop greater bonds between the next generation, both human and elephant. We hope you, our supporters, enjoy some of the photos from this wonderful book!
