Keepers' Diaries, January 2004

Voi Reintegration Unit

Nursery Elephants:- The struggle to save the life of 2 month old Ndomot dominated the month. Having failed to halt the diarrheoa, despite two courses of antibiotic, large blood clots suddenly appeared in the stools, dark in colour, indicative of haemorrhaging ulcers at the front end of the elephant’s very long digestive tract. It was now obvious that the ulcers were the root of the ill health that had plagued him for so long, probably brought on by a combination of stress and teething. Blood in the stools usually heralds the end, which plunged us all into hopeless depression, but now all the stops had to come out in one last desperate bid to retrieve this little elephant from the jaws of death. We resorted to the old fashioned remedy - Massive doses of Sulphadimidine boluses, crushed into a paste with glucose, Kaolin and herbal “bunger-ups”, administered with four hourly pillules of four different homeopathic ulcer remedies. Miraculously, this saved the day and there was celebration when little Ndomot gradually began to show signs of life again. Since then he has had just one day of obvious stomach pain but we have kept up the homeopathy, and by the month’s end, we were optimistically confident that the battle had been won, although this grave ailment has left him emaciated and weak. But, he bravely tags along; is feeding well again, having subsisted on glucose and water, with only small amounts of milk mixed with colloidal silver for days on end, and if all goes well, within another month or two, he will again be a healthy baby with plump cheeks masking the current visible prominent cheek bones of emaciation.