We're Getting Somewhere

In this bit of Charles Siebert’s Essay, the man Sheldrick Trust rehabilitated more than 60 elephants and helped them reenter the herds and live a normal life. What is new is how the elephants return to the sanctuary with their offspring, and introduce them to the human caretakers, hence the term “allograndmothers”. This fosters a “trans-species psyche” so it is, in a way, creates a sense of family ties between humans and elephants. The elephants consider us as their own, kind of like how the elephant herd at the end of the essay performed vigil, and mourned over the death of a villager. So there is scope for more improvement but humans need to connect to the other species. By creating a sanctuary in which humans used nature as a healing source, they were able to connect to the wild and understand how to bond with the elephants. It sort of detached the usual anthropocentric approach in which humans always regarded themselves as the “center of everything”. If, “humans can participate actively in the healing of themselves and nonhuman animals”, as what Bradshaw stated, there can be much more to accomplish than just 60 elephants.