Steve Irwin's Elephant Rescue Dream FINALLY Becomes Reality | Crikey! It's The Irwins

After more than 10 years of planning and strategizing, we're finally getting four female Sumatran elephants. It's the first time we've seen Sumatran elephants on Australian soil. This species is found in Indonesia and critically endangered. Steve always had his mind set on helping these elephants. This is Nort, a baby elephant, and she's just lost her mama. She's an orphan. Her mama was killed by a hideous chemical that the palm oil plantation farmers laced on some of the vegetation. It saddens me to the point of tears to see this beautiful little baby losing her grip on life. Steve has been passionate about doing something for the Sumatran elephants for many, many years. We started out by building a hospital to complement the elephant conservation centers in Sumatra. It took about 10 years to complete and it's now the largest of its kind. But it's always been our desire to breed elephants here at Australia Zoo. Oh, that feels good. Does that feel good? Four beautiful female elephants had been born in captivity, and they came from a facility in Sumatra, and I'm so happy to have them as part of our Australia Zoo family. Are you ready, huh? Are you a happy little munchkin? Lori and Manu spent a year with them in Indonesia. The elephants incorporated Lori and Manu into their family group. It's like one big happy family. This is the most surreal, remarkable, incredible experience of my life. Hey, girls. Hello, beautiful girls. Have a go at these girls. Aren't they gorgeous? These particular females were chosen because it's a matriarchal system, so you want several elephants with one lead female. Megawati is 20 years old, and she's the one who's the matriarch of the group. She helps look after all the little ones and keeps order. So this is Widya. Widya's 18 years old, and she is kind of mischievous. Christina is only 10 years old, and Christina's favorite thing is a spa treatment. Now, Lucky Lass is sort of my favorite. I don't know, but she is awfully sweet and cute. Hi, little Raffles. This is Raflesia. She is the youngest. She's five years old. She knows she's the baby and that she's really cute. Next, our girls begin their 30 days in quarantine, which will mean regular health checks and screenings to make sure that they're all healthy. Our elephants have to keep fairly confined until they get a clean bill of health, so that means they have an indoor and outdoor area, but they aren't going to be roaming the hundreds of acres that they've got until they pass their quarantine period. It's a big process, but you want to make sure that they're healthy before they start interacting with any other animals or environment. Our elephants are in the middle of their 30-day quarantine, so it's regular health checks and keeping them isolated in a beautiful grassy yard area until they pass all their health checks. But we have a problem. Rafflesia seems to have hung up her tusk, her little tusk, on something and it looks like it's broken off. Rafflesia broke her right tusk, which is not uncommon in elephants. So they'll get them on bits of wood and they'll just kind of lean and then they just snap. We flushed it first thing this morning. There's a little bit of discharge. Sumatran elephants, they don't all have tusks. The males do, but the females don't. They've got these tiny little rudimentary tusks that are called a tush and Rafflesia has broken it. So now she needs an x-ray to make sure it's going to heal okay. There's a lot of different considerations with a break like this. Infection or the fact that it's just sharp on the end or that it may be cracked further up. We just want to make sure that nothing sinister is going on. So this will be her first x-ray. If one has an infection, it could extend the quarantine for all four animals. This is the tricky part. So Terri will need to place the plate on this side next to her. She's got to hold perfectly still. Good girl. Great, that's one done. This is so incredibly important because if she spooks, it's going to take a long time to get her calm again. Great, one done. Well done everyone. She has so much trust with her human family that she holds really still. So I'll take these back to the hospital and we'll get them developed. We'll now wait to find out if she's got a clean bill of health or it means more time in quarantine. It's now been 30 days since we've gotten our beautiful Sumatran elephants at the zoo. Today's the day I find out if they pass all their health tests. I'm also going to find out if Rafflesia has gotten the clean bill of health after her x-ray. We don't want her to have any problems with that broken tush or it means more time in quarantine for all the elephants. G'day Dr. Sam. Hi Terri, how are you? Really good, how's it going? Great. And how are we looking with elephants in quarantine? So the first testing that we did was the trunk washes and we're particularly interested in the results from Rafflesia because she's the youngest and so most likely to have some health problems if there were any in the group. And I'm really pleased to say that all of the test results came back negative. So all of the elephants are clear from health problems that we could detect from their trunk wash, which is great. I'm so happy. The only other problem of course was the fractured tush. So these are the x-rays that we managed to take. You can see that nice clean fracture that we could see by looking in her mouth as well. But what we're really interested in from the x-rays is this area up here around the root. And you can see there's no change in the bone to suggest that there's any infection or any loosening of the tush. So really great news. It's a simple fracture with no infection that's extended up there. So it should just grow out and cause her no problems into the future. So what does that mean? Absolutely. They're all clear from quarantine. Oh, I'm so happy. So they can wander around and destroy trees and make the gardener cry. Absolutely. Great. This is the most incredible news. Behind the scenes at Australia Zoo. This elephant sanctuary has been years in the making. Now they can just go adventure, which is what Steve and I wanted from the very beginning.