An Elephant Crackup: The Sheldrick Trust

This is an excerpt from Charles Siebert’s essay An Elephant Crackup that highlights the growing connection between humans and elephants, specifically at the Sheldrick Trust. The Sheldrick Trust to date has rehabilitated over 60 elephants and released them back into the wild. The special thing about his case is that a number of the elephants have returned back to the Trust with their calves to introduce them to their human “allomothers”. This is really interesting because up until this point elephant violence and rehabilitation has been discussed from an anthropocentric point of view. What Siebert is suggesting now is that humans and elephants can coexist together in nature and benefit from each other. As Bradshaw states, nature has been a source of healing for humans and now we are serving as healers for elephants by becoming the caregivers the elephants lost due to either natural or human causes. This does not have to be relevant just to elephants and humans but rather to humans and all other forms of nature as well. Humans should not take such an anthropocentric view of the world but rather one that treats all living beings as one and not as a hierarchy.