At the National Elephant Center, the Focus is on Preservation and Care
The National Elephant Center aims to help manage the continent’s population of African and Asian elephants, and to provide care for aging or ailing pachyderms. Though the
At the National Elephant Center, the Focus is on Preservation and Care
The National Elephant Center aims to help manage the continent’s population of African and Asian elephants, and to provide care for aging or ailing pachyderms. Though the center is not open to the general public, it offers educational programs and special visits.
On a cool, late autumn morning in Florida, 10-year-old African elephant Tufani is happily chomping on a pile of hay, his low-bass purrs rippling through the midday air. Across the field, Thandi, his 8,200-pound “auntie,” spies him and picks up her pace, heading in his direction.
With a white egret in tow, Thandi closes in on Tufani, who defers to the matriarch of the family herd and abandons the hay pile – but not before grabbing a bunch with his trunk and making off for a spot near the lip of a pond.
Of the four elephants living at the new National Elephant Center in the east-central Florida town of Fellsmere, Thandi is known by caretakers as “boss lady.” And when it comes time for her to give the final nudge to the rambunctious teenage Tufani to leave the herd and seek his independence, there should be plenty of room here for him to find it.
The nonprofit center, which opened in May 2013 after years of planning by a national consortium of accredited zoos, spans 225 acres in the middle of 12,000 acres of orange groves. Leased from a private land owner for $1 a year for 40 years, the center intends to help manage the continent’s population of African and Asian elephants, as well as provide care and a final home for aging or ailing pachyderms.
“Not only do we provide a good home for elephants, but we provide a future for elephants,” says John Lehnhardt, the center’s volunteer executive director.
The opening of the center comes at a time when forest elephants in Africa are under severe threat of extinction, possibly within 10 years, due to their mass slaughter by poachers for ivory tusks to sell in a voracious and illegal global market.
Conservation groups now say that more than 30,000 African elephants are killed every year because of the illicit ivory trade.
The four resident elephants at the center are a family unit that came from Disney’s Animal Kingdom to make room for the expanding herd. The two adult females, Thandi and Moyo, were orphaned as babies in Zimbabwe when their families were killed during a herd culling, Lehnhardt said.
They were sent to a zoo in Washington state and then to Disney’s Animal Kingdom in 1997. The two females bonded early in life, and when Moyo had her two calves – first Tufani and now 5-year-old Tsavo – Thandi became the herd-leading disciplinary “auntie” common in matriarchal multigenerational elephant herds, which are made up of adult females and calves. The adult females are protective of the younger elephants and eventually push out the adolescent males, who then seek and establish their own territory and mates.
The center has the space to keep the herd together while going through this transition, with its five habitats of five acres each that eventually can be combined as needed. Meandering zones of up to 40 acres each also are being planned.
“They need space and then they integrate,” says Lehnhardt, who has worked with elephants for almost four decades, including with Disney’s Animal Kingdom, where he developed and oversaw the elephant program and was head of animal operations.
The four elephants at the center spend most of their days and nights in one of the fenced habitats, wandering through irrigation ditches, frolicking in the ponds, eating any of the hundreds of species of plants on the property. Upon their arrival the previous spring, they discovered the oranges on the trees and began 