Elephants – Tuesday 14th July 2020

Elephants

I know you are used to me talking about dogs, but today I want to talk about elephants. It all started with Mum and Dad thinking about their wedding anniversary. No, I’m wrong. It all started with a wonderful poster about social distancing that we have a copy of on the fridge. Somewhere in Africa, I’m not sure where, had a poster to help people understand social distancing. Basically, it says that you should stay a lion’s length away from another person – but not an actual lion. Measuring in lions would be quite dangerous. It explained you should keep 4 elephants away from an actual lion, but obviously as lions weigh a number of tonnes it said not to use actual elephants.

We now have a new system of measurement in our house. Gone are inches, centimetres, feet and metres and in came lions and elephants.

Ivory

Now back to the original point. On Wednesday Mum and Dad will have been married for fourteen years. Mum looked up what that is in the names of anniversaries and found out that traditionally fourteen is ivory. Then she had an idea. Obviously the only place for real ivory to be is on the animal that grew it and still needs it. I know what you’re thinking, she wants to put an elephant on her wish list along with the alpacas.

Thankfully she has enough sense to realise that having a real elephant in the back garden might do more damage to the vegetable troughs than even I do. Instead of bringing a real elephant home, they have decided to sponsor an elephant living in its own home in the Amboseli National Park near Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. That way they can have an ivory present for their anniversary and help an endangered species in their bid for survival.

So meet Heffalump, the latest addition to our family. (I would have called it Dumbo, but that name’s already taken, but I’d better not say who by as she’d kill me.)

If you would like to find out more about sponsoring an elephant or about the work of Born Free you can find out about them HERE

Love

Wilma