Disney Honors Save the Elephants Founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton; Douglas-Hamilton Receives $100,000 Grant From Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund to Support the Critical Conservation Work of Save the Elephants.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Save the Elephants (STE) announced today that founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Ph.D. was honored by the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund as a leading wildlife advocate for his work to preserve endangered animals. Douglas-Hamilton was one of five conservationists receiving this Disney honor. The others include international actress and model Isabella Rossellini, Dr. Jane Goodall, actor John Cleese and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. All received $100,000 grants from Disney to continue their work in wildlife conservation. The announcement was made today in a ceremony at Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

"I am deeply honored and delighted to receive this award," said Douglas-Hamilton. "My life work in elephant research has helped me approach conservation from an elephant's point of view. As these intelligent animals move through beautiful and varied regions, their survival depends on the ecological integrity of their habitat and on the attitudes of the human communities who share the same lands. The Disney award will greatly assist Save the Elephants in developing new solutions to allow people and elephants to co-exist peacefully."

Douglas-Hamilton is one of the world's foremost authorities on the African elephant. In the late 1960s he pioneered the study of elephant social behavior in Tanzania and has since studied elephants throughout Africa. He was the first to respond to the devastating increase in elephant poaching for ivory, leading to the ivory ban of 1989. He founded Save the Elephants in 1993.

About Save the Elephants

The goal of Save the Elephants (STE) is to secure a future for elephants and to sustain the beauty and ecological integrity of the places where they live; to promote man's delight in their intelligence and the diversity of their world, and to develop a tolerant relationship between the two species. STE believes elephants deserve special respect from humanity because they are sentient beings with a higher order consciousness, and intends to safeguard their future in an increasingly insecure world where their range decreases in the face of human expansion. STE focuses on research, education, grass-roots conservation, monitoring and protection of elephants through projects across Africa: Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon, South Africa and Mali. Save the Elephants has published a series of ground breaking scientific studies on the movements, reproduction, social behavior and sentience of elephants. More information on STE is available at www.savetheelephants.org.

STE is a member of the Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN), founded in 2002 to fund and foster independent conservationists focused on implementing community-based conservation programs. Information on WCN is available at www.wildnet.org.