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Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex

Last and today we go back to the late 1980s and the story of how a Kenyan woman

Dame Daphne Sheldrich became the first to rear baby orphaned African elephants.

We know them almost as well as our own children and we love them equally because an elephant can read your heart and you're not there to be successful unless you love that animal.

Dame Daphne Sheldrich was born in Kenya in 1934 when the country was a British colony.

She grew up on the farm and from an early age had an affinity with the wild animals that lived in the bush. She later fell in love and married

David Sheldrick, a pioneering game warden and conservationist who is in charge of the Sarvo National

Park, which covered a huge

swathe of eastern Kenya.

I've raised nearly all species of African wildlife, orphans,

buffaloes, rhinos, giraffes, but the elephants have been... buff,

but the elephants have been the greatest challenge.

Poaching was a problem,

poaching was a problem, huge problem. It still is a huge problem.

As long as there's a demand for ivory in the Far East and there's a lot of poverty in Africa,

you know, they're going to be people that will kill an elephant

for its tusks.

And David first came to Salvo in 1948.

You know, there was a lot of poison arrow poaching but the Somali poaching sort of started in the 80s really that took a huge toll of elephants you know

coming in with AK-47s and just spraying a whole herd of elephants, you know, many of them dying of

...