Elephants in Heaven

With a foreword by Dame Daphne Sheldrick, founder of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Elephants are often referred to as pachyderms, leading to the fallacy that nothing and no one can harm them. But we are wrong. Elephants have always been hunted and killed for their ivory. But what is often ignored: The killed elephants often leave behind young animals that have to live on traumatised and frightened as orphans. Photographer Joachim Schmeisser tells their story. Through his own elephant sponsorship, he came into contact with the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the world's largest and most successful rescue and reintroduction station for elephant orphans, which is based in Nairobi.

There, professional keepers bottle-feed the baby elephants until they are old enough to feed themselves. After some time, the cubs are taken to the Trust's reintroduction centre before being released into the wild. The aim is to integrate the elephants into their natural cycle and let them live with other reintroduced animals so that they can produce offspring and grow old. Without the Trust, the elephant orphans would have no chance of survival. Joachim Schmeisser has accompanied all these steps many times and captured the rearing of the elephant orphans up to their release in fascinating pictures. Elephants in Heaven depicts the rearing of traumatised elephants in a place that is truly heavenly for them and gives us a glimpse behind the scenes of a rearing station. The sensitive animal portraits are equally intended to convey the dramatic consequences of poaching, for Joachim Schmeisser is "concerned with beauty and transience, with dignity and the equal place of each individual."