Dan Koehl

Dan Koehl and the elephant Shiva at Stockholm Zoo Skansen
Dan Koehl and Shiva at Skansen. Photo: Roger Schederin

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 50 years, I have worked from scorpions, aquarium fishes, birds and dogs, to sealions, hippos, giraffes, rhinos and almost 100 elephants of both species.

47 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 29 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


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More websites that I produced

  • Elephant News
  • European elephant keepers association
  • Evert Taube, swedish national poet
  • Imageware scanners in Austria
  • Nature photographer Jutta Kirchner
  • Tropicarium in Kolmarden, Sweden
  • ImageWare Scanner, Austria
  • Elephant Encyclopedia and database
    ELEPHANT
    ENCYCLOPEDIA

    Established 1995
    ELEPHANT
    DATABASE
    Established 2006
    Your ip: 18.118.126.69