Kenya’s Wildlife Service rangers rescued three elephants bogged down in the muddy waters of Lake Kapnarok on Monday.
The elephants are believed to have been stranded while searching for water.
With the mud waist-deep,the elephants were sucked in every time they stretched their trunks to break free and the rangers had to try various ways of rescue, including pouring water into the pond to dilute the mud holding the elephants back.
The rangers were not the only ones who came to the rescue of the elephants.
Locals who heard the distress cries of the elephants also came. Together they maneuvered a rope around each elephant and freed all of them from the muddy water.
“Here we are today in the Kapnarok. As you can see the place is dry, and there’s no water. There is a lot of siltation that is caused by human activities uphill, and because of that the rivers that are coming down into the lake have dried up,” said Dickson Too, a warden with Kenya Wildlife Service.
While the rangers have successfully lifted the elephants out of their misery, they are faced with a greater problem, which is addressing the issue of the ongoing environmental swamp that has been dragging all the surrounding lives down into an abyss.
“I think basically when we look at what is happening around, all the rivers that are feeding into the lakes are drying up, and this is a dangerous trend in that at some point we’ll not have water in any of these lakes. So we really need to protect Kapnarok areas so that we have continuous water coming into the lakes and return the lakes as they were,” he said.