I grew up close to the Zoo Skansen in Stockholm and spend a lot of time there during childhood, and among other animals, being very facinated with the elephants, and their keeper Sven Borg.
After selling my first budgerigars to a Zoo-shop, I started to work there in afternoons rather than doing my home work, and soon became a passionated aquarist. As teenager I worked as sheepherd in Stockholm, and after working there and in Zoo-shops and farms I attended Zookeepers line at high-school.
I wanted to work with exotic animals. The same autumn, 17 years old, I went to Sri Lanka four months, studying working elephants, during the practice.
Now, as animal keeper since 51 years, I have worked from scorpions, aquarium fishes, birds and dogs, to sealions, hippos, giraffes, rhinos and almost 100 elephants of both species.
48 years as elephant keeper later, I am one of the few elephant consultants in europe, with experience from more than 90 elephants in 9 countries in three continents, from Sweden and Finland in the north, to Southafrica in the south, and Cambodia in the east.
When I started using Internet in 1995, I didnt find any information about elephants, so I made my first website. It has changed over the years, and is to a certain amount developed by its visitors, since I had a lot of questions the first years, and a lot of feedback.
The website has changed over those 30 years and a major renovation was done in october 2003 when I transfered the site into PHP and MySQL. I hope you like the website and found what you were looking for! More info: ORCID Wikipedia article, Dan Koehl CV | Contact
Pro elephantidaru