PREVIEW

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Headline: WORLD ELEPHANT DAY: A Helping Trunk For Newborn Elephant

Caption: WORLD ELEPHANT DAY (Sunday 10 Aug) A newborn elephant got a helping trunk from its mum. Wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein said the youngster had just been born in Kenya's Maasai Mara and needed some help to find its feet. Paul, a guide for Exodus Travels (www.exodus.co.uk) explains: "Elephants are being poached at an alarming rate. On World Elephant day it is critical for people to realise this and that unless this craven and wanton slaughter is stopped they will vanish in the next thirty years. "Recently in Olare Conservancy in Kenya I saw a cow give birth. This was a first for me and initially we kept our distance but the grass was good and the mother was peaceful so we then moved a little closer. It was beautiful to watch the little one, barely twenty minutes old, struggle to its feet and then try to find its mother's optics. Eventually with some help from mum it locked on and received its first vital meal. Each time it stumbled the mother and indeed other close-knit relations immediately helped the tiny fellow to its feet. "For the first hour the mother's trunk was constantly caressing and encouraging the toddler. The blood from the birth is clear on the back leg of the female and at this tender age the cub is very vulnerable but later that day we saw it tottering along happily behind Mum. "There is so much wrong with elephant poaching. It is shameful that traditional medicine and trinkets cuts such a swathe through this now much-reduced population. Elephants alive bring huge incomes in terms of tourism; dead ones, their carcasses rotting on the plains with their tusks ripped out, benefit no-one except a few and it needs stopping now, but until tough decisions and proper penalties are handed out this slaughter will continue." Paul Goldstein co-owns Kicheche Camps (www.kicheche.com) and guides for Exodus travels (www.exodus.co.uk).

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