Infected elephant
Vets have saved the life of a young elephant by performing emergency surgery after it was shot with a poison arrow and left to rot to death by poachers.
The four ton bull was targeted in Kenya's Tsavo National Park by poachers who almost certainly expected to return to the animal and cut of its tusks to sell as ivory when it finally succumbed to the poison and died a slow and painful death several days later.
But thankfully a group of vets found the wounded animal in time and were able to fire an anaesthetising dart into its rump and then perform emergency surgery to remove the arrow, drain the pus and poison, cut away the foul-smelling infected flesh and close the wound using clay.
Miraculously, just minutes after the surgery was completed, the elephant was able to stand up and walk away as if nothing had happened.
Around 35,000 African elephants were killed by poachers last year - the equivalent of one every 15 minutes. If that rate of illegal hunting continues, there will be no African elephants left in the wild by the year 2025.
