2012 saw in a new year with a new elephant, Seetha joined the gang at MEF on the 3rd January 2012.

A large, healthy elephant in her late 30′s and her owner sent her to us instead of going to work in a place where she would have been forced to wear a heavy and painful howdah.

Her mahout Kapilla is very friendly and they have worked together for 8 years.

Seetha has big floppy ears and lots of pale pigmentations down her trunk giving her a very distinctive look.

She arrived late in the afternoon and after a drink and a bath was taken to bed with a huge pile of food, she was very confident and beginning to explore straight away. The next morning she got stuck straight into meeting tourists and will work with volunteers soon too.

This is not Seethas first visit to MEF, as a baby in the 70′s she was taken from the wild with Government permission with assistance from Sam Samarasinghe, the elephant expert in whose memory MEF was set up in 1999. Since then she would have worked in various industries such as logging and tourism.

Seetha has settled quickly into life at MEF, she is quite a cheeky elephant as is her mahout, she was not so keen on the friendly dogs that live onsite ( looked after by Dogstar Foundation) but she soon got used to them and her favourite food is bananas!

 

 

Seetha and kapilla started working with volunteers in January 2012, she has very quickly charmed the volunteers and is lovely to work with, even playing by trying to steal the coconut husk as she was being scrubbed!

She participated in Januarys Pera Hera and the volunteers went out with the    MVU to supervise, they were delighted to bump into Seetha and see her in action and we think she was just as pleased to see them!

They were impressed by her majestic costume complete with lights which had been carefully checked to make sure that they were in correct working order and not likely to give her any shocks!

For more information see out Blog page for a volunteers account of working with Seetha and seeing her at the Pera Hera.