Tara, the elephant who taught me how to live

The two founders of Elephant Family are wallowing in a river in Kanha national park, Madhya Pradesh, India. One of them is adventurer, campaigner and raconteur Mark Shand.

The other is an elephant. Tossing Mark onto her wrinkled black back, Tara curls her trunk and snorts a jet of water over her head - a welcome relief from the 42 degree heat. Mark responds by leaping off her rear into the river. It's an unlikely partnership but it is a successful one: the pair's charity has already raised millions from Londoners to help save the Asian elephant.

This time last year, 260 elephant sculptures decorated by artists and designers including Tommy Hilfiger and Matthew Williamson lined the streets of London.

The brightly coloured, five-feet tall sculptures were moulded out of fibreglass and dotted around London's most famous landmarks, where they were gleefully received by locals and tourists alike. When they were finally auctioned off at the end of summer, they raised £4million to help the endangered Asian elephant.

I recently spent a week with Tara and Mark in India, to see how those funds are being spent. On Wednesday, Elephant Family is ready to launch the next phase of its campaign by celebrating Tara's 50th birthday in London with an art sale that includes work from Richard Symonds, Angela Conner and George Butler.

"Tara is basically what everything comes from in Elephant Family," says Mark, who lives in Bayswater. "She gave me a purpose in life for which I can never repay her enough."

When Mark and Tara's friendship began 23 years ago he certainly wasn't looking for a purpose in life. Mark, an aspiring writer, had decided that a good topic for his next travel memoir would be an elephant ride across India. So he decided to buy an elephant, a purchase that set him back some £4,000. "It was as simple as that. It was not a passion for elephants at all," he says.

The pair quickly forged a bond, however, and by the end of his 800-mile journey Mark couldn't bear to leave her behind.

"It was always her teaching me, rather than the other way around," he says. "That's how I look at it. They are always one step ahead."

In the wild, they can expect to live for 60 years, and, according to Mark, their stages in life mirror humans, from teenage rebellion through to mellow old age.

Tara is happiest when she's eating, her favourite foods being bamboo, sugar cane and gur - a solid lump of unrefined sugar that upsets her stomach but which she adores.

If you pass the food straight into her mouth, her slippery pink tongue bulges out from her drooping lips and she slurps at your forearms hungrily. Anything passing her lips - and she gets through 136kg of grass a day - makes a fabulous echoing ker-plunk, like a pebble dropped into a bucket.

Tara's trunk is as long as I am tall, and considerably stronger - a slap from it is "like five rounds with Mike Tyson," says Mark. One of her most impressive routines is to break up a stick of bamboo, sharpen it against a rock, and use it to pick at her cuticles and brush her toenails - a pachyderm pedicure.

Later, we work up a sweat scrubbing Tara as she stretches out on the shoreline. Her skin is surprisingly soft, all wrinkled and hummocky and covered in thick, black, bristly hairs.

Mark may be approaching his 60th birthday but from the way he scrubs Tara, you wouldn't know it. He's already had one hip replacement - with the other to follow this year - but he's still talking about having "one more journey" in him.

As the brother-in-law of Prince Charles, you might assume Mark takes a back-seat role at Elephant Family, perhaps whipping out his formidable contacts book every now and then. Not so. "I'm not blowing my own trumpet - but [when Elephant Family launched] I was a driving force with my team. I drove myself into the ground. And I probably didn't do all the right things at first but you learn."

Clearly, this is not a man who's planning a leisurely retirement. But then, the clock is ticking for the Asian elephant, whose numbers have fallen by 90 per cent in the past 100 years.

Elephant Family has calculated that it needs to raise £50million in the next 10 years if it is to secure a long-term future for the species in India. The challenges are many and varied but they all stem from the same problem: human encroachment on the elephants' habitat.

Elephants require a lot of land. They must follow seasonal migratory patterns to survive; their routes, however, are being blocked by agriculture, roads, canal irrigation systems and illegal opencast mines. With these migratory patterns and food sources disrupted through ever-shrinking forests, elephants raid villagers' crops - sometimes with deadly consequences.

One of Elephant Family's top priorities is to acquire National Park status for wildlife corridors, the traditional migratory routes of elephants, and it does this by partnering with NGOs to purchase land. This is where much of the London money has been spent. A route six kilometres long by half a kilometre wide in Kerala, south India, for instance, cost £1million to secure.

"It really is about land," says Mark. "If you think about it, elephants are a big species. They need acres and acres of land."

Getting hold of that land is the difficult part. Most of it is already owned by the Indian government, so NGOs can only pay for the land to be reclassified as a national park - an act which protects it from development. Once it has been declared a national park, it can be denotified, but only by an act of parliament - a risk that the charity has to weigh up.

"There's a risk in everything," says Mark, "but more and more people are watching much more carefully. Once it's bought, the land effectively becomes the property of the government - and then they are subject to a legally binding document that says they cannot build on it."

The land reclamation also means that Elephant Family needs to relocate villagers, who are given new land and homes and paid to resettle a short distance away.

"We're not forcing people out," says Mark. "In one corridor there were 58 families. We literally didn't get them very far off the corridor - only half a kilometre - and they're happy and they're making money."

The Wildlife Protection Society of India is one of the NGOs that benefits from Elephant Family's funding. Its executive director, Belinda Wright, 58, has spent her life photographing wildlife in India and is a committed conservationist.

Her passion for photography has seen her attacked by tigers and charged by a herd of 79 elephants. A resilient conservation campaigner, she makes a charismatic addition to Elephant Family's mission, and a portion of the £4million raised provides funding for many of the elephant conservation projects she is currently working on.

More than £9,000 has been invested in saving elephants from electrocution from overhead power lines. In the state of Orissa, at least 150 elephants have died by grabbing hold of the power lines with their trunks. "To save money, electrical companies put poles just a few feet from the ground," explains Belinda. "Really huge numbers are affected. So we document them, file court cases, write to the electrical companies and highlight it in the media."

Poachers still present a significant problem to elephant populations, which are hunted for their tusks. Unfortunately, national park forest departments are often ill-equipped to manage such threats. In Kerala, Elephant Family paid £3,208 for a broken wireless system to be refurbished so that forest rangers could communicate easily, and continues to train them in the latest methods used by poachers.

Belinda's biggest task, however, is to keep pressure on the Indian government to keep its promises.

"Huge sums of money are required to allow those wild elephants to have a life," she says. "And the government has the money, and has set aside the money, but unless you bully them, they won't produce it. So we're lobbying the Indian government to do what it has already agreed to do."

It is obvious that there is a lot of work to be done. It seems unlikely, however, that Mark will return to his London flat and rest on his laurels. "I like challenges. I always have done. If you don't have challenges, what's the point in getting up in the morning?" he says. In any case, he is certainly not a city type. "I find it very difficult," he says. "I'm not in my natural habitat in the city. And I can't sit still for very long. I get terribly restless."

Sounds just like Tara.