You see a lot of intelligence
in those elephants, they're very
socially aware, they look for other males to pal up with,
they'll chase and roll around with others.
They have their own bonds
and they're all families, so there will be always their
leader, the one that always guides the whole group,
which in this case that would be Danum.
He was in a very rough condition when we found him,
emaciated and dehydrated, very skinny.
- There was no herd nearby, so it's
a big mystery as to where he came from.
If the rescue unit rangers hadn't
found him when they did, he wouldn't have survived.
The Wildlife Rescue Unit specializes
in helping folks when they have issues with animals.
They get all sorts of calls from everything from
elephants down to small snakes.
And they do an excellent job of moving the animals,
they want to keep them in the wild as much as they can.
Unfortunately, the reality is that you
can't just take in an orphan, give
them some food, and release them back
out into the forest on their own.
- I'm not saying it's impossible
but it is really hard...since they get used to humans.
They get close contact with humans.
When we've rescued them, they
are being feed every two hours.
They literally take our rangers as a surrogate mother.
When you find a baby elephant,
I will say below two years old,
they really depend on the mother.
So if an elephant is alone, on it's own,
even if they want to eat, they cannot do it.
We have found some elephants that literally,
they have been eating mud or soil, just for
the fact that they are hungry, they want to eat something.
- They don't have the resources
to give them a life that they want to give them,
when they have them in captivity,
and there's no place to release them to.
They take them out to the lake
where they can play several times a day.
They can wrestle around with each other and play in the mud.
But they're also trying to teach them
some skills so that they can take
care of them later in life as they get larger.
And that's kinda where we can come in.
One of the things that we're doing
is funding two full-time elephant keepers.
Vincent and the other rangers are
incredibly passionate about the
elephants that they care for.
- We do not have all the food
that an elephant requires, so the rangers on their own,
they go and collect extra food from the areas nearby.
It's a hard job but they do it
because they know the animals need it.
- They're doing it because they
care about the future of Borneo.
And to allow us to just have a small
part in that is incredibly meaningful.
And I think it was because of that
relationship that we had built
that I was able to work this small elephant, Danum,
and teach him a very simple behavior,
which was to put it's nose on it's head.
Which is like teaching your dog to sit,
it's almost the first behavior
you'd teach an elephant because
they're always out sniffing and moving their trunk around.
So if you can control where the trunk goes,
you know that you have their attention.
The best part about it was looking
around the room and watching other rangers
watching what I was doing and start
to practice that with the other elephants.
Showing them that with some small steps,
you can make huge gains with the animals
and the care that you're able to provide.
What it's gonna mean is that the elephants
are not only gonna participate in their care,
they're gonna be able to act more like elephants.
What makes a human-elephant conflict in Borneo
so complex is that they're running
out of space and resources for these
young elephants that they have to care for.
They're finding more elephants than they have space for.
They don't have the capacity to give
them the lives that they want to give them.
- To talk about Danum's future, it's
at this point, very uncertain.
To be very, very, very honest,
there are some days when I wake up
and I feel very, very hopeful.
And when I see all the wildlife
rescue unit rangers work and work
really hard on the job they do, that makes me feel hopeful.
They literally lift me up and I say
"Okay guys, let's do this. We can do this.
We can...do more for wildlife".
This little bit that we are doing, it means a lot.
- If we don't take action, the extinction
of the Bornean elephants in our lifetime is a possibility.
How do they prevent orphans from coming into captive care?
How do they educate young kids to
respect the elephants that are damaging their communities.
There's no simple answer to a complex question.
And this is a very complex situation.
You have elephants that are...
destroying people's livelihoods.
You have palm oil plantations that
are encroaching on the forests
and young elephants that are being
separated from their herd as they're
pushed out of those spaces.
You have elephants that are getting caught in snares
that are in the jungle, folks that
are trying to feed their family to catch small prey,
are unintentionally snaring elephant legs.
- If I could have a magic wand,
that I can make people understand
to live in harmony with elephants.
Not only elephants, but wildlife.
We are sharing the same Earth.
Then I would be more optimistic on Danum's future.
So what we are doing now is trying our best,
not only with the elephants, but also
with public awareness and education.
So we can have a more promising future,
not only for Danum but for all
the elephants that we rescue.