A petition calling on newly elected Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to declare poaching a national disaster is continuing to gather signatories, almost three weeks after it was closed.

A team of trained elephant keepers replace the orphans’ lost families

When the organisation Kenyans United Against Poaching delivered the petition it had collected 6,000 signatures, but it now has more than 11,000.

The decimation of the elephant population in Africa for their tusks and bush meat has seen their numbers plummeting by more than half.

The western black rhino has already been officially declared extinct, and at the rate things are going, there is a very real fear elephants may soon follow suit, with poaching levels at a record high.

Their continuous loss of habitat due to drought and human population pressures further exacerbates an already dire situation.

A United Nations decision to officially characterise international wildlife trafficking as a serious organised crime may finally be the impetus to give international law enforcement officials the tools to counter the climbing rates of poaching.

The black market of flora and fauna is worth some $17 billion a year, according to Global Financial Integrity, a Washington watchdog group, making it the fourth largest transnational crime in the world.

One of several organisations fighting back is the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust with its Nairobi nursery, the world’s most successful orphan elephant rescue and rehabilitation centre.

Set up in 1977, the small charity has been caring for baby elephants and occasionally baby rhinos that have been orphaned by poachers, lost or abandoned for natural reasons from all over Kenya.

They are kept at the nursery on the periphery of Nairobi National Park outside the Kenyan capital Nairobi during their two-year fragile infant stage until they are no longer dependent on milk.

The elephants are then moved to Tsavo National Park, Kenya’s largest wildlife refuge, where they gradually make the transition back to the wild, which can take up to 10 years.

A team of trained elephant keepers replace the orphans’ lost families until their transition to rejoin the wild herds has been accomplished. To date, more than 80 young elephants have been saved, reared and offered a second chance of life and freedom.

Every day at 11am, visitors crowd into a field at the nursery to watch the elephants being brought by the keepers to a cordoned area to play and feed.

Visitors are not allowed to feed them, but they do get close enough to pet them, and even to join them for a spot of football should one of the elephants knock one of their play balls towards them.

And to top it all, if watching them really melts one’s heart, there’s the option of fostering your very own elephant!