The Reteti Elephant Sanctuary is the first community-owned and run elephant sanctuary in Africa. Located on the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya, Reteti was founded in 2016 by Katie Rowe-Bastard, her husband Jeremy Bastard, and elders of the Samburu community. Reteti, which means “blessed” in the Samburu dialect of the Maa language, is currently home to over 30 orphaned elephants. Reteti’s goal is to reintroduce each orphan to the wild.

Below, Katie discusses the story of Reteti, and the symbiotic relationship between keeper and elephant.
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The Samburu understand elephants better than anybody because they’ve lived alongside them and shared resources with them. They’re also cattle people, so they have this deeply embedded history with the landscape.

You really can’t find a better keeper, and it’s amazing to see how quickly the Samburu became experts in raising orphans. For them, it was hard to believe that this was possible. To bottle-feed an elephant and support it until it’s old enough to go back into the wild seemed like a crazy concept, but it didn’t take long for them to see it, feel it and believe it.

The majority of why we see orphans at Reteti is because of climate change and human-wildlife conflict. The seasons are not as predictable as they used to be, and droughts are a very stressful time for the people and wildlife. As things become more desperate and the water table drops lower and lower, the elephants are using well water, and they end up falling in.

“As population rises and there’s more pressure on water sources and livestock grazing, that’s a breeding ground for tension between humans and wildlife,” Katie said. “Human-wildlife conflict comes out of that. It’s not poaching necessarily, but there’s just conflict over these resources.” ***Ami Vitale Photo***

There was a need for a sanctuary because many orphans were coming up throughout the year. A sanctuary would also create much-needed employment and was the next step toward community conservation, where elephants from this area could be raised by the Samburu and then rewilded within this landscape.

A board elected by the community oversees the operations of the Sanctuary, and Reteti is giving the community an opportunity for employment outside of being a cattle herder or pastoralist.

Reteti is breaking stereotypes in many ways: one, that local communities can manage their wildlife, and two, that women can be keepers and conservationists.

An Animal-Led Approach to Wildlife Conservation

The main aim of Reteti is to rewild every elephant. The idea is not to let them become too comfortable with their human families because we want them living with wild elephants in a wilderness landscape.

Elephants are critical to keeping a landscape healthy. They have very poor digestion, so they transport seeds in their dung and are vital to seed distribution.

“The Sanctuary is tucked into a valley, and the mountains around Reteti act as a natural barrier,” Katie said. “The vegetation around the Sanctuary is diverse, so there’s much for the elephants to explore while safe within this mountain cradle.” ***Ami Vitale Photo***

They also create water holes, digging with their tusks when they find dry riverbeds. They are engineers of this landscape, and when you remove that keystone species, you’re removing the health of an ecosystem that many different animals rely on.

We’re very lucky because, essentially, we’re never taking the elephant out of the wild. From the moment of rescue to release, they’re staying within their home range and the landscape they’ve always been in.

We’ve got 40 elephants now, and they spend the whole day out in the bush. They usually stay within a few kilometers of the Sanctuary, but they’re always with keepers. The elephants graze, browse, and self-select what they want to eat, and they’re wild in the sense that they’re doing what they would if they were with their family herd.

The elephants come back at night, and some sleep in the boma, a fenced area. We have some stables, which some elephants like to go into, and others don’t. It really is elephant-led, the way we do things. We let the elephants organize the dynamics within the herd, and then we follow that plan and support them. I feel proud that Reteti has that stance.

Learning Curves

There were certainly challenges in starting the Sanctuary, and all had reasons and really good lessons. It was a real adventure, but an exciting one to go on with this community and for these elephants.

There’s always this overwhelming worry that we’re not going to get the nutrition right. A baby elephant is such a big responsibility, and it was worrying whether we’d be up for this task.

“The Samburu have always shared their landscape with elephants, and they’ve always shared water,” Katie said. “Traditionally, it’s always been a very close relationship because the elephants will often smell out the water first within a dry riverbed. They’ll start digging until they reach the water, and then the people will come after and see where the elephants have dug. The people will dig a little bit more to get water for themselves, and then in the nighttime, the elephants will come back. So, there is a very symbiotic relationship with elephants, and it’s very close.” ***Ami Vitale Photo***

Elephants—they’re so intelligent as well, so they outsmart us all the time. Some of the challenges were quite funny because of simple things like putting Shaba, one of our elephants, who is very smart, into her stable. She figured out how to open the stable door and let herself out. She’d also turn the tap on or let the other elephants out of their stables.

We have another, Pokot, who is always late to come in, last to get his bottle, or always at the back of the herd. Not because he’s a loner, but because he seems to get distracted. All the elephants have unique characters that keep the keepers on their toes.

You always have to be focused with elephants because they’re such smart animals. You have to be aware of the signals you’re giving off, and you have to read their behavior very carefully and understand their emotions.

A lot of these elephants are traumatized from their rescue or the reason that they’re orphaned. They’re heartbroken, they go through a lot of tragedy, and it’s very stressful for them. So, you need to be able to read that an elephant is upset or stressed, just like with all animals. Except these are a couple hundred kilos each.

There’s also trying to make sure that the people and elephants are safe. The area they live and browse in is completely unfenced wilderness, so our keepers are out on thousands of acres with a herd of orphaned elephants. They bump into wild elephants and wild animals, but because the Samburu have done this for hundreds of years with their cattle, they really know what they’re doing.

All these worries went through our heads and still do, but elephants are amazing, and they really look out for each other and their human keepers. It’s a really strong bond between keeper and elephant.

A New Dawn in Community Conservation

A lot of the keepers never felt that they would ever have a life outside being pastoralists. Traditionally, if a community member wanted to find work, they would have to leave home and head towards the city or another area. To have this opportunity of employment within their home, on their own land, is exciting for them.

The other thing that has been amazing to watch is how women have come into a very important role at Reteti. Usually, it’s the men who have the opportunity for jobs, but it’s been obvious how fantastic women are at looking after elephants. They have these instincts of how to look after very young elephants, so there’s been this opportunity for women to really step into the limelight and show how important they are.

The Samburu have always respected women. Women and men just have their roles in their society. The men own the cattle, but the women own the milk, and they sort of have those ways of respecting each other. But when it comes to work and where employment is available, it’s still male-dominated.

From the moment we started Reteti, we had four keepers, and two of them were women. We’ve got more women keepers now, though the majority are still men. We get a lot of school groups coming through, and young girls see these women in the workplace doing jobs that men do just as well, if not better. It’s a step in the right direction, and it’s happening organically and in the right time and space.

Reteti: A Sanctuary for Orphaned Elephants and Their People

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