Annual care, per elephant
Food and browse, veterinary and foot care, medication, keeper time, habitat maintenance, water, fencing and insurance.
Support
Every gift goes straight to their care.
The retreat keeps the lights on. Your generosity is what lets us say yes to the next elephant, and the one after that — and care for every one of them for the rest of their lives.
What it costs
One elephant. One year.
These are the real numbers. We publish them because we think you deserve to see exactly what your support makes possible — not just a warm feeling, but the actual scale of a life.
$94k
$180k
To bring one home
Negotiation, a transport crate, a veterinary escort, quarantine, and the slow, patient months of settling in that follow every arrival.
30 yrs
The commitment
The rest-of-her-life promise we make with every intake. We never welcome an elephant we can't care for to the very end.
Give
A little every month goes further than you'd think.
A steady hundred dollars a month lets us plan years ahead for an animal — which is exactly the kind of promise elephant care requires. One-time gifts are wonderful too, and every single one helps. But monthly givers are the quiet heroes of this model.
Every gift is unrestricted unless you tell us otherwise, which means it goes wherever the care team says it's needed most — often the unglamorous things, like fencing and water pumps, that quietly make everything else possible.
$40
A day of browse and produce for one elephant
$260
A voluntary foot care session, start to finish
$1,200
A month of geriatric pain management for Ruth
$7,800
A month of full care for one resident
$94,000
A named year of care, reported to you in full
Sponsorship
Choose one elephant, and stand behind her for years.
Sponsors adopt a named resident and receive her file four times a year: keeper reports, medical notes, habitat footage filmed with nobody around, and the parts of her story we don't share on the website. You'll know her better than almost anyone.
The one thing sponsorship can't include, at any level, is hands-on time with her — her retirement means no more meetings, poses or appearances, for anyone. We've found that the people drawn to sponsor an elephant here are exactly the people who love that about it.
- Friend — $50 a month. Quarterly file and the annual welfare audit.
- Guardian — $250 a month. The above, plus a monthly keeper letter and a members' evening invitation.
- Patron — $1,000 a month. The above, plus a named plaque in the retirement barn and two cabin nights a year.
We cap the number of sponsors per resident, so every sponsor gets the full story, every quarter, properly told.
Partners & grants
Partners who fund the unglamorous things.
Corporate partnerships and grants underwrite the specific, essential things: the veterinary barn, the water system, the fencing program, the keeper training fund.
We're careful, too. We pass on partnerships that ask for elephant photo opportunities or events on the habitat side of the fence — and we say a grateful yes to organizations that want to fund real infrastructure and be thanked sincerely for it.
- Named infrastructure — barn, wallow, water tower, boundary
- Winnie’s Farm — the rescue barn, paddocks and feed program
- Multi-year keeper training and salary underwriting
- Veterinary equipment and senior-elephant care programs
- Habitat expansion, acre by acre
- Matched-giving campaigns for the endowment
Legacy giving
A gift that outlives all of us.
Our care endowment exists so that a bad year, a recession, or anything else the world throws at us never becomes an elephant's problem. We fund it before we spend surplus on anything else, and it's built to cover full care for the whole herd for three years, even with no income at all.
Gifts in wills, appreciated stock, donor-advised funds and charitable trusts all go to the endowment by default. And if you'd like to see exactly what your legacy would protect, we'll happily walk you through the model, line by line.
Transparency
We share everything, every year — the good and the hard.
Our annual accounts, the independent welfare audit, intake decisions and the full field log are all public. If we ever have a hard year with an animal, you'll hear it from us first, honestly and completely.
Lovie’s Haven is a registered non-profit. Gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.