Mama Elephant
Meet Dame Daphne Sheldrick, a conservationist in Kenya known as 'Mama Elephant' who rescued and rehabilitated over 230 orphaned baby elephants during her life, and changed the fate of elephant populations around the world with a special milk formula she pioneered to keep orphaned elephants alive.
Born on a dairy farm in Kenya in 1934, Daphne graduated at the top of her class and was offered a medical scholarship but turned it down to move to Tsavo National Park with her first husband, who worked as an assistant warden. It was here she met her second husband David Sheldrick, the founding warden of the park and together they forged 22,000 km2 of wilderness into a protected space for Kenya’s largest elephant population and other wild species.
Daphne focused on rescuing young elephants whose mothers had killed by ivory hunters, but despite all her attempts to feed baby elephants different milk sources, they remained malnourished and died. Determined to find a solution, Daphne experimented with pantry items like baby formula and coconut milk to find the right mix. After 28 years of testing, she created a formula that used coconut oil to mimic a mother elephant's milk and became the first person in the world to keep a newborn elephant alive.
In 1977, Daphne’s husband died from a heart attack, leaving her to raise their two daughters and continue his conservation work. After his death, Daphne founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and over the next 40 years, Daphne rescued and reintegrated hundreds of orphaned elephants into the wild and became one of the earliest advocates for a global ban on ivory.
Daphne broke the mould when it came to conservation work, trading khaki pant suits for flowing floral dresses as she tended to baby elephants in the muddy wilds of Kenya. After a long battle with breast cancer, Daphne died in 2018 at 83 years old. She leaves a legacy of ground-breaking conservation work and is responsible for shaping our understanding of elephants, who she described as “a very human animal.”
In the acknowledgments of her memoir, “Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story,” Daphne thanked “the elephants themselves, who by example have demonstrated how to cope with adversity. . . .They, who have suffered so much at the hands of humans, never lose the ability to forgive, even though, being elephants, they will never be able to forget.”
