Robert Bateman (Prints)

Tembo (Print)

Artist's page

Giclee Canvas Museum Edition 180 s/n 40 AP
30" x 40" / 76.20cm x 101.60cm
Unframed (US Dollar): $1,195.00

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Also In:

(Giclee Canvas Museum Edition: 60 x 80, 50 s/n 12 AP, $4800.00 U.S.)
(42 x 56, 99 s/n 33 AP, $2295.00 U.S.)

“Elephants deserve the high stature they enjoy. We humans appreciate them not just for their impressive size,

but also for their high order of intelligence and sophisticated social structure. Unlike most animals, they care
about each other’s welfare. Most herds are composed of adult females and young. When the juvenile males
start to take too much interest in “the girls,” they are expelled form the herd and roam in loose bachelor
groups that are much smaller in size than the family groups. My family and I encountered one such bachelor
group in a park in northeast Kenya. We were delighted and surprised to find several bulls with very large tusks.

Frighteningly, this area is right within the range of organized gangs of poachers, particularly in Somalia.
Although the park is patrolled against poaching, the rangers are too few in number and are usually
out-gunned. Those tusks must be awfully tempting to the illicit ivory trade. We hoped the bulls we saw
there would stay close to the tourist areas for safety. We, however, got too close to this fellow. Though
his tusks were large, he was young and feisty and presented us with an impressive false charge. He is
“Tembo” in Swahili – a familiar term for elephant. I hope that he will live to a ripe old age and pass
on his genes to future generations of elephants so future generations of humans can appreciate them.”