Support from Mara Elephant Project’s partner, Elephanatics, highlights their commitment through activism to elephant protection and ecosystem conservation. Our aligning missions couldn’t be more indicative of this, MEP’s mission is to protect elephants to conserve the greater Mara ecosystem in Kenya and Elephanatics’ mission is to assist global elephant conservation efforts by educating Canadians about issues of ivory poaching and habitat loss by connecting them directly with organization’s in Africa like MEP.
Formed in May 2013, Elephanatics is an elephant advocacy organization residing in Vancouver, B.C. Canada that focuses on three pillars of advocacy: conservation, education and action. MEP’s approach to protecting elephants is also three pronged: elephant collaring, monitoring and research; anti-poaching patrols and rapid response units; and human-elephant conflict mitigation, which includes community engagement and education amongst other innovative techniques and technologies.
Elephanatics three pillars have guided the organization’s boots on the ground actions for the last three years by hosting the Global March for Elephants and Rhinos, an annual event with over 140 cities participating worldwide. MEP is also a “boots on the ground organization,” deploying rangers on the ground to mitigate human-elephant conflict. We are truly two organizations working on a parallel path.
A photo of the Elephanatics supporters at the Global Walk for Elephants and Rhinos in Vancouver.
The MEP connection comes from Dr. Jake Wall, the co-founder and chief scientific researcher of Elephanatics. Dr. Wall and MEP worked together in 2016 on his GPS tracking system with advanced mapping technology algorithms that can detect abnormalities in a single elephant’s movements. MEP used Dr. Wall’s tracking system on our collared elephants to detect poaching or injury in an elephant’s movements. Dr. Wall recently visited MEP HQ in 2017 and will be coming back in 2018 to do further research on his tracking system.
Mara Elephant Project is humbled to receive a donation in 2018, the money raised from Elephanatics’ most recent Global Walk for Elephants and Rhinos in September 2017. Mara Elephant Project would like to thank Elephanatics for their generous donation and continued commitment and support.
