CONSERVATION
The trauma of elephant translocation
Recent research suggests that the translocation of elephants has a disruptive effect on their group networks. For orphans deprived of a matriarch, vital social and environmental knowledge is lost
16 February 2023 - 05:00
For 10 years, Heike Zitzer spent more time with elephants than she did with people, recording the animals’ movements, habits and relationships, and the symptoms of the traumas they had endured at the hands of humans.
One of the products of her work, a hefty paper on how translocation and orphaning disrupt the lives of elephants, has just been published, and “irony” doesn’t come close to describing how its appearance has coincided with a tragedy for the animals she sees as her family...
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