{"id":496,"date":"2011-08-30T07:02:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T12:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/?p=496"},"modified":"2020-01-03T17:28:33","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T22:28:33","slug":"mumbushi-is-no-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/?p=496","title":{"rendered":"Mumbushi is no more&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What cruel irony that I posted Mubushi&#8217;s story yesterday as today I got very sad news:<\/p>\n<pre>\r\n30th August 2011 has been another tragic and sad day<\/pre>\n<pre>for all of us in our  Nairobi Elephant Nursery,<\/pre>\n<pre>and also for all the foster-parents of<\/pre>\n<pre>this tiny orphaned elephant named Mumbushi,<\/pre>\n<pre>the smallest baby in our Nairobi Nursery<\/pre>\n<pre>who was deeply loved and cosseted by all.<\/pre>\n<pre>After a promising start,<\/pre>\n<pre>it is very difficult to weather<\/pre>\n<pre>the sinking feeling of failure all over again,<\/pre>\n<pre>combined with the emotional trauma<\/pre>\n<pre>of losing one who was so deeply loved. \r\n\r\nMumbushi was just 2 months old when<\/pre>\n<pre>his elephant mother fell victim to poacher\u2019s<\/pre>\n<pre>within the Mt. Kenya forests,<\/pre>\n<pre>not only taking her life for a tooth,<\/pre>\n<pre>but also brutalizing her tiny two month old infant,<\/pre>\n<pre>slashing him across the face with a machete,<\/pre>\n<pre>leaving a deep gash and an eye that threatened blindness.<\/pre>\n<pre>With daily tender loving care we could give him,<\/pre>\n<pre>we healed his wound and his eye<\/pre>\n<pre>and also the sorrow of losing his elephant mother.<\/pre>\n<pre>For a  brief few weeks little Mumbushi was whole again,<\/pre>\n<pre>happy and playful and adored<\/pre>\n<pre>by all the older Nursery elephants<\/pre>\n<pre>as well as the Keepers and the visiting public who met him.<\/pre>\n<pre>He charmed them all.<\/pre>\n<pre>\r\nThen the teething began.<\/pre>\n<pre>Cutting the first molars is always problematical for infant elephants,<\/pre>\n<pre>and I wish I knew what magic formula their elephant mothers have<\/pre>\n<pre>to alleviate the symptoms we see every time in the Nursery \u2013<\/pre>\n<pre>loss of appetite, diarrheoa and fevers.<\/pre>\n<pre>For Mumbushi, this proved particularly difficult<\/pre>\n<pre>because a number of teeth popped through at the same time,<\/pre>\n<pre>pushing in different direction.<\/pre>\n<pre>On top of everything else this simply proved too much.<\/pre>\n<pre>He began to loose condition,<\/pre>\n<pre>suffered stomach problems which we found difficult to control, went off his milk,<\/pre>\n<pre>and just gave up the ghost<\/pre>\n<pre>when the dreaded pneumonia struck two days ago<\/pre>\n<pre>and failed to respond to injectible antibiotic.<\/pre>\n<pre>He passed away at 4.30 a.m. this morning.<\/pre>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: 'Courier New', fixed; font-size: 11px; line-height: 13px; white-space: pre\" class=\"Apple-style-span\"> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What cruel irony that I posted Mubushi&#8217;s story yesterday as today I got very sad news: 30th August 2011 has been another tragic and sad day for all of us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5063,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions\/5063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flyingplates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}