Elephants & Wildlife Rehabilitation

[00:00:00] Alex Re: Hello, welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host Alex Re, on this podcast, we bring the wild to you. We take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every month, and I guarantee you, you're gonna come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. We're starting off the new year with an animal that I covered in one of our very first episodes.

[00:00:24] But our guest, Nikki Sharp, is here to offer a fresh perspective on these beloved animals. And their conservation. Nikki is the executive director of Wildlife, SOS, and she works to support the rescue and long-term care of different animal species across India. You may be more familiar with the African variety of the animal that will be covering today, but there is also a species that lives in Asia, so let's start the interview.

[00:00:52] And talk about elephants.

[00:01:10] Just a warning before we jump into the interview, Nikki touches on some topics like the inhumane treatment of animals that can be disturbing. So please listen with care. Hi, Nikki. How are you

[00:01:24] Nikki Sharp: Alex? I'm doing very well, thank you. How are you doing?

[00:01:27] Alex Re: I'm doing great, and I'm so glad that you're joining me today on the podcast.

[00:01:32] Thanks so much for coming on. I would love to get started with hearing about what first inspired you to get into wildlife rehabilitation?

[00:01:41] Nikki Sharp: Well, well, I was working for a nonprofit that was working, helping dogs and cats, actually, to make the states no kill. Working in nonprofit, helping animals, you often meet other people in nonprofits helping animals.

[00:01:59] And this one opportunity came my way where I was told that these people from India were coming to town and what I like to go out to dinner with them and I was told they worked with bears in India helping dancing bears and something I hadn't ever heard about before. So of course I jumped on that opportunity.

[00:02:19] I went out to dinner this one night and it really did change my life. I listened to this, these two people who had started an organization in India, and they talked about this problem that they were trying to address, and they said that there's a situation in India. These bears are taken as cubs from the wild.

[00:02:41] They kill the mother and they take the cubs, and then they turn them into dancing bears, and that's by putting a rope through their muzzle and then forcing them to live at the end of this rope and in pain the rest of their life. And as traumatizing as that story was to hear what I found myself feeling was really inspired because they had a solution to solve the problem.

[00:03:08] We often hear about problems that are just so awful, but we feel helpless to do anything about it. But they had not just a solution, but they had a timeline. They said, we are gonna finish this problem in 10 years. And so I found myself at the end of this discussion or this dinner saying, well, what can I do to help?

[00:03:29] And that was in 2005. And. So little by little I got more involved to the point that I ended up changing my whole life so that I could help them achieve that goal.

[00:03:43] Alex Re: Wow, that, that sounds awesome. And it's so nice to back up conservation talks with a hope and with a timeline saying, we're gonna get this done.

[00:03:54] It. I feel like giving hope to people really drives them to want to create change.

[00:04:01] Nikki Sharp: Absolutely. My training is as a physical therapist, and when I came outta school, it was always very, very goal oriented. So I wanna help this person to be able to walk in their home, do stairs in four weeks, and you create, uh, a strategy in how to get there, strengthening balance, all these things that go into helping somebody achieve their goal.

[00:04:25] And a lot of the goals that we have for, for wildlife are the same thing. It's not enough just to say, we wanna save tigers or we wanna save elephants. We have to say, we wanna save them and this is how we're gonna get there. Because people wanna give to not just what you believe in, but they wanna know that there's a plan on how you're gonna achieve that goal.

[00:04:49] And so I got involved because the way they. Thought about, you know, helping these animals really, really resonated with me and something that I could get behind. And so that is the start of an important time that changed my life from, from what I was doing to focusing on helping wildlife in India.

[00:05:12] Alex Re: That's great.

[00:05:13] And now you're the executive Director of Wildlife, SOS. So can you tell us a little bit about that organization and what you do there?

[00:05:21] Nikki Sharp: So this organization is the same organization that started with the Dancing Bears. I oversee the USA chapter of it, but it's basically everything we're doing here is to be more successful in India.

[00:05:36] So that goal that I told you about, to bring it in to Dancing Bears was realized at the end of 2009. And if you go to India and you visit the Taj Mahal, you will not see dancing bears in front of the Taj Mahal anymore. And the first time I went there, you would see these poor bears out there. So it started as volunteer work and it just continued to evolve to the point that now I work full-time for the organization and we have expanded our programs beyond just helping the bears.

[00:06:07] And I have to say that the species of bear that was used to become. Dancing bears are called sloth bears, and a lot of times people go, I have no idea there are even bears in in India. And so I need to make sure that the people listen to this podcast, that they know that there are four species of bears in India.

[00:06:27] Alex Re: That's great. Yeah, absolutely. And now one of the animals that you work with is elephants. So Yes. Can you tell me about the rehabilitation process?

[00:06:39] Nikki Sharp: So, I had no idea that I would eventually be working with elephants, although if you had asked me in high school what your dream job would be, I would've said, oh, I, I hope someday to work with elephants.

[00:06:51] So, somehow or another, my life has navigated in such a way that I am following the dream that I had in high school. But we started working with elephants in India. Because like dancing bears, there are a lot of elephants that live in captivity and they are really, really poorly treated. Horribly treated.

[00:07:14] I just can't say this enough. And so everything, we started to learn about really how to solve the dancing bear problem. We realized we could use a lot of those strategies to help India's elephants, so Asian elephants. Are an endangered species. There's only about, I think, 35 to 40,000 left in the world.

[00:07:38] And if you compare that to African elephants, there's about 400,000 African left. So where they live in terms of their closeness to being potentially extinct and highly endangered is, is they're really, really close. CLO and getting closer on that mark. And one of the things that is impacting the wild populations is that they are being caught and they are being driven into captivity.

[00:08:07] And when you see an elephant that is being used for riding in India, or you see an elephant that's being kept in a temple, what you need to know is that every single one of those elephants was born in the wild. So these are not elephants that were captive bred. They were taken as wild elephant and forced into that captivity.

[00:08:30] And so that moment that they're taken, their lives are just brutal. They're just rarely ever shown mercy. And so a lot of what we started doing was realizing, well, there has to be something that we can do to help these elephants and. So we start, you start with that first one, and you learn a lot of like, okay, we can't rescue every single elephant this same way.

[00:08:55] You learn a lot about how to care for them and how to manage them. And in India, although there's a lot of history of people keeping captive elephants, that goes back hundreds of years, centuries, the knowledge of how to actually manage a captive elephant in a humane way didn't exist. We wanted to help these elephants, but finding people in India who could help us care for these elephants in a way that was not cruel was definitely a, a new process that we had to learn.

[00:09:28] So we started rescuing elephants around the same time we rescued the last bear, and what we had to realize was like, okay, these elephants are kept in chains. We wanna keep them in a chain free situation. That's like the first goal that they don't, they're not. Tied to a 10 foot chain where they can never lie down and they can never scratch themselves.

[00:09:49] Just getting the basics, so

[00:09:51] Jess Avellino: mm-hmm.

[00:09:51] Nikki Sharp: The program was starting by taking in a couple of elephants that were in just such bad shape that were like, okay, we, we'll help, like an elephant that was hit by a truck and they didn't think would live. And we're like, okay, well we'll try to help this elephant. We'll bring him to our center and see what we can do.

[00:10:11] Sure enough, with Love and Care and the veterinarians to help that Elephant went on to live, he's still with us since 2009, 15 years later.

[00:10:21] Alex Re: Oh wow.

[00:10:22] Nikki Sharp: And we definitely started on a journey of helping elephants. And the more we learn, the more we realize, okay, we really need to have programs in place to help these elephants.

[00:10:34] And so that is somewhat of how we did, never went into like help. Planning to be an organization that focused on elephants, but it evolved into an organization just because nobody else was really doing it in India.

[00:10:48] Alex Re: That's really great and it's, I feel like it's important to know, like these elephants aren't captive raised elephants that you would see in a zoo.

[00:10:59] These are being used for. Entertainment and caught in the wild. Two very different things.

[00:11:06] Nikki Sharp: Exploited. They are exploited. And so I tell you, every time I hear someone say, oh, I would love to go to India, it's on my bucket list to ride an elephant, I just cringe. I'm like, no, because although you see these highly decorated elephants, what you don't see is the brutality that makes them.

[00:11:26] Able to ride. You have a 10,000 pound animal, so you have to make them afraid of people in order to be able to ride them. So you think about. The brutality, the torture is endless for these animals, although they look like, oh, everybody loves elephants. They are, it's quite the opposite from the appearance that they give.

[00:11:47] So yes, you are absolutely right that seeing these elephants in captivity, they all came from the wild. They went through a process called faja, and that's basically breaking the spirit. So what does it take to break the spirit of a 10,000 pound animal? And it's. But just heart wrenching.

[00:12:08] Alex Re: Yeah. I mean, it, it sounds absolutely horrible and, and elephants are very intelligent creatures.

[00:12:15] So could you talk about some of their mental needs when you're rehabilitating them?

[00:12:23] Nikki Sharp: Yes. Let me start with a story first about one of my favorite elephants. I. Came to India one time after this elephant named Surj, which means son was rescued. He had been in a temple for 40 some years, meaning he never left this temple.

[00:12:42] His whole life was spent inside a temple giving blessings to people. He was, he was chained on all four legs and he just. He was an, he was just a, a very, very, very pathetic situation when, when we, when our team arrived to help him. Now, when I got there, he, I wondered if he was ever going to be able to adapt to a life of freedom with not being in chains and being able to see beyond the walls.

[00:13:13] And the reason why I wondered because is they, the team, our wildlife SOS veterinary team ended up putting like a green screen around him because everything around him scared him. 'cause he wasn't used to seeing birds and he wasn't used to being able to see at a distance. And so everything frightened him and that fear just made him react in a way that you could tell that he would had a lot of anxiety.

[00:13:40] I left very, very, I think, depressed because I was like, I, I think it might be too late for him. And I came back six months later and I was standing at one place in the center and I saw this elephant just walking casually towards where I was. He was about a quarter of a mile away. But I saw him getting closer and closer and I finally said, which elephant is that I don't recognize him?

[00:14:04] And they said, that's Sage. And I just. Almost fainted on the spot because he went from having to be placed in creating a green room around him to like out for these very long strolls, and he just looked so happy and he just looked like he was philosophizing the whole way and thinking about life, and there was just a contentness about him that was very, very palpable.

[00:14:34] But I think. What I learned is that you should just never, ever give up on them because they are really smart. They are able to start learning trust. They are, you know, these are things that are taken away from them. They don't trust, they're fearful, the time they're mistreated. But once you start giving them opportunities not to feel lonely and to have good food, and to feel like they can lie down and rest without being afraid that something will happen to them.

[00:15:05] Once you start giving them that feeling of safety, they understand safety, that can really, really change them in ways that are just so profound that I don't know that I could ever properly articulate just how intelligent they are and, and you can take so much away from them. But what we are able to do when we rescue them is we are able to give them so much back that they can start being an elephant again.

[00:15:32] Alex Re: It's heartbreaking to hear about some of the conditions that these elephants have had to spend the majority of their lives in, but that story shows that it's never too late to rehabilitate them and make them feel safe again. With that said, let's take a quick break and when we get back we'll hear more about some of the experiences that Nikki has had working with elephants at Wildlife SOS.

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[00:16:46] now, back to the episode. Mm-hmm. And they are also very social animals, so being in isolation is also just really kind of like torture to them.

[00:16:59] Nikki Sharp: Yeah. I think that's one of the hardest things to. Uh, to wrap my brain around too, especially the females, the females live in these large herds, so when you take 'em away and you live force them to live solitary lives, a lot of them are blinded.

[00:17:15] So they live isolated, alone in, in darkness, and they never ever experience a comforting touch of another elephant by them or the call to hear another elephant communicating with them. So that they, they have very, very complicated emotional lives. And that is, to me, one of the hardest things when I realized everything that's taken from them to realize that, you know, their families and their opportunity to connect with others was stripped from their ability, from not just their freedom, but just their ability to be elephants.

[00:17:53] Alex Re: Definitely. And could you describe one of your more memorable experiences working at wildlife? SOS?

[00:18:01] Nikki Sharp: There, there are so many and, and of course this one is also, one is was one, one of my favorite stories, but, but one of my more memorable ones is just even more recently I was in, I was in India and this is before an elephant was rescued.

[00:18:18] So there was an elephant that I knew we wanted to help. And I went out to see him and he was in a very remote part of India, but he was unapproachable. He was, he had a broken leg, but he was, he was chained to a tree, but he was in what you call must, it's a very, very hormonal time for male elephants and they tend to be very agitated, so nobody could get close to this elephant.

[00:18:45] So we wanted to help this elephant and I, I looked at this elephant. Your heart goes out 'cause he's got a broken leg, yet he's still chained to a tree. Like he can't hardly stand. And I just couldn't, I, I just couldn't, the, the days just were, for me, torture, waiting for when it'd be okay for us to get him off that tree and bring him to safety to our center.

[00:19:14] And finally that day came. And the feeling I had when he got loaded onto that truck and he started his journey to his new life and to know that he was gonna be free, I can't, I can't explain to you the sense of joy that I have felt. 'cause I, I, when I would close my eyes, I would see that poor elephant standing there by that tree and to know that he's no longer there and he's swimming in pools now and he's pampered and he.

[00:19:46] He's got the life that he deserves. It gives me so much satisfaction.

[00:19:51] Alex Re: Yep. That, that's really amazing. And is there anything surprising that you've learned about elephants that you didn't know before you started working with them?

[00:19:59] Nikki Sharp: Well, I'm always learning something new. Um, and I'll share with, I'll share with you something I've been finding out that's really quite fascinating recently is we have been bringing out an acupuncture specialist who has now been training our vet.

[00:20:15] In acupuncture and we've been starting to do acupuncture to help our elephants. And you know what, they are responding amazingly to acupuncture. Who knew that, you know, putting in these needles would help them be able to, like they've had colleagues that they've had treated with acupuncture. So things like that can be very life threatening.

[00:20:37] And you had an elephant. She, she always loved to get in the pool, and then her arthritis got so bad she couldn't even walk to the pool anymore, and so they tried this acupuncture technique called like circle the dragon around this one bad leg of hers. And within two days she was walking to the pool and going swimming.

[00:20:55] So it just, it just sometimes fun to see that they respond to the same things we do. You know, in terms of, you know, all, you know. Yeah, some things don't work, so you gotta try other things and other things will just work wonders. And so they often surprise you in the types of treatments that they respond to.

[00:21:15] And so that is, that is one of the more recent stories. Something that, something new.

[00:21:20] Alex Re: That is really interesting. And yeah, I mean, I've tried acupuncture myself. It, it's, uh, definitely a very relaxing process,

[00:21:28] Nikki Sharp: Uhhuh

[00:21:29] Alex Re: Uhhuh, and I find that there's a lot of people that, that find it really helpful, so That's so interesting.

[00:21:34] Nikki Sharp: Yeah, so I think our vets, I'll be the first, um, I don't know, specialist and elephant acupuncture, so

[00:21:43] Alex Re: That's so cool.

[00:21:44] Nikki Sharp: So yeah. Yeah, it's wonderful.

[00:21:46] Alex Re: And is there something that people misunderstand about wildlife rehabilitation?

[00:21:53] Nikki Sharp: I think yes, I, I would, I would say that the one thing that people often think is that if you just take off the chains, they're gonna be fine.

[00:22:05] They'll know freedom and. What people have to understand is that you can't give them too much at once because it, like that elephant I was telling you about surge, it can be too scary for them. And so we rescue these elephants. A lot of times they have bells on their neck and people get so frustrated with us because.

[00:22:30] Two weeks, four weeks after their rescue, they're still wearing this bell on their neck. And they're like, why are you not taking that bell off their neck, leaving them like this? You know, these signs of their past life, you need to take 'em off. And we find that we have to really just be very, very cautious about not giving them too much new experiences at once.

[00:22:54] And sometimes what. Like that bell that you wanna take off, it might make 'em more confused and just more disoriented. So we have to be very, very cautious. Some of the things are counterintuitive. We just have to make sure that we take things in stages if we really want to help guide them through, through a process, not scaring them more.

[00:23:14] 'cause everything's new to them. Freedom is new to them, and so you have to get them comfortable with the idea of freedom.

[00:23:21] Alex Re: I think that's really. Interesting and parallels wildlife conservation as a whole. Yes. Uh, because people think that you donate a certain amount of money and it, the problem should be fixed.

[00:23:33] Right. But it's, it's a gradual process and there's so many different factors that, that are involved in conservation that it's not gonna change overnight. E

[00:23:45] Nikki Sharp: exactly. That. I can take the bear situation as an example, is when we rescued the last Dancing Bear, people were like, oh, okay, the problem's done. We can move on to other things.

[00:23:59] And we were very, very adamant that we had to continue for at least a generation working in this community of people who had been dancing bears to make sure. No one went back to it. So we want it to be sustainable. Right? And so a lot of the things that you do are putting things in place so that your success is sustainable and not short-lived.

[00:24:24] Alex Re: Definitely. And that brings up another interesting point, which is how, how do you balance the needs of the local community with the needs of the wildlife that live there?

[00:24:35] Nikki Sharp: You know, that's of always a tricky, tricky. Balance And part of it is, is understanding what the needs of the local community are because everything is different.

[00:24:46] In the situation with the Bears, the people who were dancing the bears were so poor that that if you took away the bear, they were just gonna go get another bear and they had no other. Vocational skills, that's what their fathers had done, their fathers. Fathers. It's just, if you went back generations, it was just kind of passed down from one to the next.

[00:25:09] So you have to spend time really understanding, well, if we wanna end this problem, it's gonna have to involve the community. So what we, what do we need to do with this community to end the problem? And with this case it was, well, we had to give them new vocations, new ways to earn money and. They need to be raising, earning more money than they did dancing bears.

[00:25:31] They need, it needs to be sort of like a no-brainer. Why would I dance bears if I can make three times, 10 times as much driving a tutu? So you really have to understand the community and figure out what their needs are in order to be able to have any sort of lasting impact. And when you understand that you can actually have real changes.

[00:25:56] With the situation with elephants, that's a little bit different. It tends not to be poverty that's causing these elephants to end up in cap captivity. It's very, very different types of problems. A lot of people who own the elephants are very, very wealthy, powerful people and so having an elephant is a sign of power and prestige so, so there's a lot of complications 'cause it's not gonna be changing vocations that help.

[00:26:24] To facilitate getting the, these elephants out of the situations that they're in. It's gonna take other types of interventions.

[00:26:32] Alex Re: Yeah, that's, that's a really nuanced problem between different species even in the same area. That's really interesting. And what are some of the other issues that these elephants are facing?

[00:26:45] You mentioned that they're endangered and there's only about 30 to 40,000 of them left.

[00:26:51] Nikki Sharp: Yes. So there's only about 30 to 40,000 of them left. The majority of them are found in India. So our best hope for their survival is in India. Now, India is also, if you follow world populations, it's also the most populous country in the world.

[00:27:13] So there's about 1.3 to 1.4 billion people. Living in an area that is smaller than the United States. So you imagine if we had four or five, six times the population that we currently have in the United States, how much more complicated it would be for wildlife conservation here. But they do have a very good conservation ethic in India.

[00:27:40] Which makes it possible to, I can't imagine if we had that kind of population issue in the United States having wild elephants, right? We've struggled to bring back wolves and, and in India you have tigers making a comeback. I think there's over 3000 tigers left, or it's gone from 2000 to 3000 in a, in a country with such large numbers of people, you're gonna have a lot of human.

[00:28:07] Elephant conflicts. So elephants get into the crops. You got crop rating, and so you have problems there. There are railroads, crisscrossing everywhere, and elephants get hit, um, by trains all the time. There are demands for more space for people, so their traditional migratory routes are disappearing so they don't have the same space that they need in order to be able to live on the same.

[00:28:37] Landscape. So they are switching and trying to find different places to go, and it's just creating more conflicts. So we are doing programs to try to help reduce the conflicts that we see between elephants and people in certain areas. And we've had a lot of great success with it, but we have to be able to do it at scale to be able to address helping 25,000 elephants in India.

[00:29:02] So right now we're focused on one area with about. A couple hundred elephants. So like the, the, the needs that we have to address that countrywide are just beyond what we can possibly do right now.

[00:29:16] Alex Re: Yeah. But I think it's even great to start small and then work your way up. So it just like you did with the dancing bears as well.

[00:29:25] Nikki Sharp: Yes. And that's the thing is like if you can show programs that are successful that work, and especially win-wins. Where people aren't having to sacrifice their crops for the elephants, and elephants aren't being captured or killed because they're, they're problematic. So if you can have, uh, if you can have situations where you can show, we can help the elephants and we can help the people, it's win-win.

[00:29:51] It doesn't have to be one or the other. Then it creates, it definitely creates examples that other areas can follow.

[00:29:59] Alex Re: That's great. And what is something that the average person can do to help elephants?

[00:30:05] Nikki Sharp: Well, I think the first thing we can do is remember if we ever go to India, remember refuse to ride elephants, keep that message and

[00:30:16] Jess Avellino: mm-hmm.

[00:30:17] Nikki Sharp: Even if you're not going pass that message on to someone else who you know might be going, because that message is so critical, if you want to preserve. Elephants being captured for the captivity trade. So that's the first thing people can do. And then of course, the second thing is if you really wanna protect elephants, you know, find an organization that you believe in, in, in their work, and money goes a long way to, to making a difference.

[00:30:48] And so find somebody and show your support, because this is. I, I, I don't think I meet anybody who doesn't love animals who says they don't love elephants. So if you love, if you love animals and you love elephants and you wanna protect 'em, you know, we can't wait until a more convenient time to save these animals.

[00:31:10] We have to take action now.

[00:31:12] Alex Re: Absolutely. And where can we support wildlife os?

[00:31:16] Nikki Sharp: Well, you can go to our website. That's always a good place to start, and that is wildlife sos.org.

[00:31:22] Alex Re: Great. That's, that's amazing and I really appreciate you coming on again, Nikki. Thank you so much. It was great talking to you about elephants and wildlife rehabilitation.

[00:31:33] So I, I really appreciate you coming on.

[00:31:36] Nikki Sharp: Oh, I was so happy to be invited on your show. Thank you.

[00:31:39] Alex Re: Nikki was such an amazing person to talk with, and the work she and wildlife SOS are doing is invaluable. It's easy when talking about conservation to look at the big picture, and that's obviously really important.

[00:31:53] But I love how wildlife SOS is helping individual elephants who have faced a lifetime of trauma caused by humans, and while helping individual elephants, they're also working to stop the elephant captivity trade. The Asian elephant is currently listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List, so supporting organizations that help elephants is critical to their survival.

[00:32:17] You should definitely go take a look at Wildlife, SOS, and you can also check out The Born Free Foundation and the International Elephant Foundation. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explored the world of elephants. You can find the sources that we use for this podcast and links to organizations that we referenced@onwildlife.org.

[00:32:39] You can also email us with any questions at On Wildlife dot podcast@gmail.com, and you can follow us on Instagram at On Wildlife, or on TikTok at On Wildlife. And don't forget to tune in next month for another awesome episode. And that's on Wildlife

[00:33:03] Jess Avellino: You've been listening to On Wildlife with Alex Re. On Wildlife provides general educational information on various topics as a public service. Which should not be construed as professional, financial, real estate, tax, or legal advice. These are our personal opinions only. Please refer to our full disclaimer policy on our website for full details.