The giraffes who check daily on the man who rescued them

The British Guardian posted a photo of a giraffe who was rescued by a man called Lekupania who works in the north of Kenya in the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy.

 

Lekupania found this giraffe, a baby at the time, when he fell into a ditch.  He rehabilitated him and returned him to the wild.  He has done this with other injured giraffes.  And with other animal kinds.

 

The giraffes trek daily to the stables of their recuperation and then return to the wild.

Only the giraffes do this.

 

This conservancy is in the territory of the Samburu, a semi-nomadic tribe of cattle-herders. 

 

They, their cattle, their way of life and all the wildlife among whom they live and about whom they have unparalleled knowledge,

are under extreme pressure for changes to their ecology and climate.  This is also true of all tribes living in territories contiguous with that of the Samburu on either side of the Kenyan-Ethiopian border who keep cattle and camels.

 

This photo was taken in 2016 by Ami Vitale who saw this encounter from some distance and approached quietly and quickly to take this shot.

 

 

Photograph: Ami Vitale, 2016

 

Fupi the orphaned giraffe returns to his whisperer – Ami Vitale’s best photograph | Photography | The Guardian

 

 

4 thoughts on “The giraffes who check daily on the man who rescued them”

  1. I would like, somehow, to look at this photo once a day forever. Thank you so much, Sarah, for finding and sending it.

  2. This seems to all but prove that animal species have forms of consciousness – other than merely instinct – which seem to exist on a continuum from – perhaps – rudimentary or minisuscule to the ‘advanced’ type of our own problematic species!
    Love, Sarah

  4. The opening photograph is magnificent for any number of reasons.Sarah, it has such a large impact on me-immediately it takes me to my knees. The encounter exudes such kindness, such high thanksgiving.
    It exudes pure Love.

    I want to include a quotation from Henry Beston’s book: ‘The outermost House’:
    “ We need another and a wiser, and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization, surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, and sees thereby a feather magnified, and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we ere, and greatly ere. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move, finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost, or never attained,living by voices we shall never hear.
    They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
    ( “they are other nations)”
    Sarah,These last are the words that make me soar.

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