Post #29 Kiruba the Elephant

Meet Kiruba, my Asian elephant 🙂

As mentioned in my last post, on impulse I signed up to adopt a tiger on the WWF website.  As this only cost a few pounds per month & as I’d seen a news report about the dreadful poaching of elephants, I wanted an elephant as well.  How can anyone kill such magnificent & noble creatures?  It brings tears to my eyes, but the soft toy reminds me that I’m doing a little towards protecting the species.

Kiruba is around 40 years old with a son called Anand & a daughter Tula.  She’s the matriarch of a tribe of about 20 elephants living in the Corbett National Park at the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India.  The population of Asian elephants hasn’t declined quite as much as the tigers as there are approximately 40-50,000 left from 100,000 in the year 1900.  They are still on the endangered list though & there’s nothing quite a cute as a baby elephant is there?

They make good soft toys – when we were babies, my brother didn’t have a teddy bear, he had a cuddly toy elephant called Empt, which he carried everywhere holding onto his trunk 🙂

Post #28 Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

This is the newest addition to the household – meet Kamrita 🙂

She’s a Bengal tiger, about 9-10 years old, with two cubs (a male & a female) & she lives in the Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal.  I’ve ‘adopted’ her through the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) after watching one of their ads on TV, which followed a read of the book ‘Life of Pi‘, which may be a blog subject itself.  Tigers abound!

It’s not expensive, only a few pounds each month to become one of Kamrita’s adopters, but it felt so good to do so.  I don’t usually have cuddly toys, just a couple bought for me by family, but I wanted a reminder of the magnificent beauty of these endangered animals.  Now I can carry-on smiling as I stroke her, knowing my money is going to a worth-while cause.

Like all tigers, Kamrita has her own individual pattern of stripes & the WWF can monitor where she is when she crosses an infra-red beam, thus triggering a camera.  It’s important to keep an eye on tigers in the wild as they’ve declined in numbers from more than 100,000 at the turn of the century to as little as 3,200 today – a reduction of more than 95%!