Rare elephant twins born in Kenya

Nairobi (AFP):  An elephant in Kenya has given birth to a set of twins, a conservation group said on Friday, a rare event for the planet’s largest land mammals.

Save the Elephants said that the twins, both female, were born in the Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya to a mother named Alto, describing it as “double joy”.

Twins make up only about one per cent of elephant births, although another pair — one male and one female — were born in the same reserve in early 2022.

A video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Save the Elephants, showed the baby elephants feeding from their mother, alongside other members of the herd.

African elephants have the largest gestation period of any living mammal, carrying their young for nearly 22 months, and give birth roughly every four years.

However, elephant twins do not often fare so well. A previous pair of twins born in Samburu in 2006 failed to survive more than a few days.

The African savanna elephant is classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which says poaching and habitat destruction had a devastating effect on elephant numbers in Africa as a whole.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, there are more than 36,000 elephants in the East African country, with efforts to stem poaching halting a decline in numbers.

The elephant population in Kenya stood at 170,000 in the 1970s and early 1980s but plunged to only 16,000 by the end of 1989 because of the demand for ivory, it said.