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An elephant who spent most of her life in captivity at the Bloemfontein zoo will soon be freed into the wild.
The mammoth task of relocating 27-year-old Thandora from the zoo where she has spent the past 23 years, gets underway on Tuesday.
And, its expected that some 12 hours later she will join a herd of elephants at Gondwana Game Reserve outside Mossel Bay on the Garden Route.
Gondwana owner and conservationist, Mark Rutherford, says he was approached some six months ago by Greg Vogt, the founder of Conservation Global, who was looking for a new home for Thandora.
"We could easily have probably got a small herd from a large game reserve somewhere but we questioned what that was doing for conservation and what it was doing for the animals. We then decided what we would actually do is look for animals that are wanting to be released and we would create and put it together.
Thandora is just another step in the right direction for us to be able to create what we hope to be the nucleus of a wild population in the Southern Cape in the years to come" Rutherford said.
