From Tracker to Rhino Carer: Raising Ol Jogi’s Orphaned Rhinos

The Story of Peter Lucas

A Beginning in the Bush

Peter Lucas is twenty-nine years old when he sits down to recount, calmly and without embellishment, a life spent in the service of animals. He was raised in Laikipia North, in a place called Ewaso, near the Loisaba Conservancy, country where the land is wide and the sky goes on forever. As a young man, he had imagined himself in the Kenya Defense Forces, drawn to the discipline and purpose of military service. The bush, it turned out, had other plans.

It was an older man called Kerotane who changed the course of his life. Kerotane knew a crew of scouts who came ahead of visiting guests to prepare the conservancy, and told Peter there was a two-week job going. Peter took it. He never really left. On the twenty-second of June 1997, he began work at Ol Jogi as a casual tracker, accompanying Alex, a senior ranger, on walks with guests through the conservancy. Three months later, on the first of October that same year, he was confirmed as a permanent team member, barely out of his teenage years, already having found the work that would define his life.

From Dogs to the Boma

The early years took Peter through roles that no formal job description could have predicted. He began by caring for hunting dogs belonging to Alex and to the conservancy’s then-manager for close to two years. From there, he became handler for a cheetah named Bandit, Jangili in Swahili, a word meaning outlaw, a name given perhaps with some irony. Peter looked after Bandit for three years, building the kind of trust that can only exist between a man and a wild animal when both have decided, slowly, to accept the other.

He moved next into security, guarding the main house before being posted to the conservancy’s front gate, where he remained until 2004. It was around this time that Ol Jogi began relocating rhinos from a section of the conservancy called Pyramid onto the main ranch. Six bulls came first: Dunia, Baruti, Limpopo, Mpateani, Sendeo, and a sixth whose name Peter admits he has since forgotten. The rhino programme was growing, and with it, the need for people who understood the animals not as symbols or statistics, but as individuals.

In 2012, a boma, an enclosure for injured or orphaned rhinos, was constructed on the conservancy, and Peter was one of two people selected to run it. He and his colleague Lewis Shikongo were sent to Ol Pejeta Conservancy to learn the work. They were told there was a blind rhino there, and that when the boma was ready, they would be responsible for it. In January 2013, they took up their posts. Three days later, on the sixteenth, the boma received its first resident, a rhino named Alfie, blind, and in need of the constant, attentive monitoring that only someone who truly knew him could provide.

The Worst Day, and What Survived

Peter Lucas has seen much in his years on the conservancy. But when asked about the hardest moment of his working life, he does not hesitate. It was more than a decade ago. Poachers, wakora, he calls them, the Swahili word carrying all the contempt it deserves, had moved onto the conservancy and killed rhino.

“That was the worst day of my life,” Peter says simply, without dramatising it. The grief in the statement is the somber kind, the kind carried for years.

A nine-month-old rhino escaped the attack. He became the first rhino Peter raised entirely from the beginning; a calf he called Bobby. Unlike Alfie, who had already been partially habituated to humans, Bobby came to Peter raw and frightened, with no prior experience of human hands. Peter fed him, stayed with him, and weaned him slowly from the bottle. It was a new kind of work, not guarding or patrolling, but parenting.

The boma’s third resident was a female calf found wandering alone in an area monitored by Ol Jogi’s rhino tracking teams, a calf without her mother being cause for alarm. What the rangers discovered when they approached was worse still, she was blind. With authorisation from Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), she was brought to the boma. They treated her eyes and cared for her as best they could, but she carried internal troubles beyond what the eye could see, stress-related ulcers in her stomach, complications the team fought to manage over the years that followed. After three years in their care, Meme died. “We were very sad to lose her,” Peter says. “Not just because we loved her. We had done everything we could. But it was beyond us.”

The fourth rhino brought its own challenge. He refused from the beginning to take milk from a bottle, a problem that could have proved fatal. Peter and Shikongo proposed something unconventional, releasing the animal into a small enclosure beside the boma and simply watching what instinct would do. Freed from the pressure of hand-feeding, the calf walked out and began to graze on his own. They let him feed outside, supplementing as needed, until his sixth month, when he no longer needed them at all. By that point, Peter had guided four rhinos through his hands, four entirely different temperaments, four entirely different stories.

Bella

The fifth rhino to pass through Peter’s care is still with him. Her name is Bella, and she was born on the sixth of February 2023, sometime between four and five in the morning. It was a rhino monitor named Evans Barongo who first raised the alarm, a newborn calf lying still, refusing to move. The dry season had taken a toll on Bella’s mother, Namnyak, who was not producing enough milk, and a KWS veterinarian confirmed it, the calf was starving. On the eighth of February, Peter was told to prepare. A new resident was coming.

The early days were filled with crisis. On Bella’s second day at the boma, Peter noticed a wound on her neck. Cleaning it, he found pus and the unmistakable marks of teeth, she had been attacked by a hyena before she had even been brought in. The antibiotics prescribed to treat the infected wound brought their own complications, severe diarrhoea that threatened to dehydrate her faster than the team could rehydrate her.

The solution Peter and his team arrived at was striking in its practicality. They collected stool from Alfie, the boma’s long-established and healthy first resident, dissolved it into what Peter describes simply as a soup, and mixed it into Bella’s milk. The bacterial cultures from Alfie’s gut, introduced into Bella’s system, helped restore the microbial balance she had lost. It worked. Today, Peter has been with Bella for over three years. She is thriving and will remain under his care before she is ready to be released back into the wild.

For a man who once imagined himself in the Kenya Defence Forces, the distance between that ambition and this life could not be greater, or more meaningful. “This work is still a good cause,” he says. “To help the environment. To help the animals.” At Ol Jogi, that cause is carried forward every morning before dawn by people like Peter, patient, observant, and utterly committed to the lives in their care.