Today I witnessed something I never dreamt I would ever see, an elephant Postmortem. We travelled on foot into the bush wHere a local village had reported a dead elephant. One of the rangers from the area had been watching him for several days. The young bull had been getting steadily weaker and was finally found collapsed from exhaustion.
MIKE (monitoring of the illegal killing of elephants) requires that a postmortem be performed on all elephants found in a preserved enough state to make it possible.
I had never seen anything like it. As layer after layer of skin and muscle and tissue was pulled back he appeared no longer as a mighty beast of nature, but as vulnerable and weak.
A member of the village watched intently as an animal that they view as part of the tribe was diminished in front of him.