An elephant, believed to be Kenya’s largest tusked female, has died of old age in the east African country, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said Tuesday (November 1).
Dida, known for her long tusks, was estimated to be 60 to 65 years old. The life expectancy of elephants in the wild is estimated at around sixty years. “She died of natural causes due to her advanced age,” KWS tweeted.
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The elephant lived in southeastern Kenya’s vast Tsavo National Park, known for its flora and fauna. Dida “led her herd through many seasons and difficult times,” KWS traced.
Female elephants often live in close-knit families with calves by their side, while male elephants tend to be solitary.
Dida’s death comes nearly a month after that of another famous elephant in Samburu Game Reserve, an arid area of central Kenya facing one of the worst droughts in forty years.
Exceptional dryness
Monsoon (which means ‘monsoon’ in English), a woman in her 60s and mother of seven elephants, had survived poachers five times. The elephant was euthanized in late September after NGO Save the Elephants said the elephant’s poor health was due to their age but had been “worsened by drought”.
Kenya, the economic powerhouse of East Africa, has been suffering from droughts of unprecedented intensity for four decades, and hunger is affecting at least 4 million people out of a population of more than 50 million.
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The absence of the last four rainy seasons has created the driest conditions there since the early 1980s: rivers and wells dried up, pastures turned to dust, and more than one and a half million cattle died in the country.
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