When elephants lose their matriarchs—being the oldest, they have the biggest tusks, so they’re poachers biggest targets—entire families dissolve. The psychological effects are terrible, Save the Elephants’ head of field operations David Daballen told me, even in the increasingly rare case that ...
She hadn’t had the heart to cut off their tusks, and that decision made them targets. Although she couldn’t see how anyone could stand to harm them. She adored every inch of their wrinkly faces and trunks. When she and David came here, she was just shy of twenty, and the preserve...