Elephants on the move in Kenya
Wildlife officials in Kenya kicked off a relocation operation for 30 elephants on Wednesday, fitting monitoring collars on the tranquilized animals before using cranes to swing them, inverted with bound feet and scything tusks, onto flatbed trucks.
Kenya has several thousand elephants, who face threats such as ivory poachers and habitat loss, but they often raid crops and farms as they migrate between parks, angering villagers who rely on the produce to feed their families.
The Kenya Wildlife Service, which transported the animals from Nyeri county, around 200 km (124 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi, to the Tsavo East National Park in a bid to avert such encounters, estimated the operation cost $6 million.
The ranch and the surrounding Lamuria region, home to about 300 elephants, forms part of a migration corridor for the pachyderms between the parks in the country’s Mount Kenyaand Aberdare mountain ranges. (Reuters)
Photography by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
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