From the BBC:
“Kaavan, the world's loneliest elephant, is
finally going free”
For decades,
the world's loneliest elephant has entertained crowds from his small, barren patch
of land in a Pakistani zoo. The visitors would call for more as he saluted
them, prompted by handlers who poked him with nailed bull hooks to make him
perform for the money which lined their pockets. Around him, animals
disappeared from their enclosures, rumoured to be bound for the plates of the
wealthy, while his only companion died, allegedly of sepsis brought on by those
bull-hook nails digging deep into her skin. And for years, it seemed that no
one cared about the elephant's lonely fate. His wounds became infected and the
chains around his legs slowly left permanent scars. He drifted slowly into
psychosis and obesity. But on Sunday, the world's loneliest elephant will
finally leave behind his desolate enclosure for a new life on the other side of
the continent, thanks to the determination of a coalition of determined
volunteers and, somewhat unexpectedly, the American pop icon Cher. This is the
story of Kaavan. It begins with a prayer and ends in a song.
The prayer Kaavan
may never have ended up in Pakistan had it not been for a Bollywood film, some
delicate international diplomacy, and the whims of one little girl. Zain Zia,
the daughter of Pakistan's then-military ruler Gen Ziaul Haq, fell in love with
elephants after watching Haathi Mere Saathi (Elephants my Friends). And so, she
uttered a prayer. "I looked up at the sky and prayed, Allah Mian,
give me a haathi mera saathi (dear God, give me an elephant to be my
friend)," Zain told the BBC recently. Her prayer was heard - by her
father. One morning not long afterwards, as Zain was getting ready for school,
Gen Haq asked her to stop, blindfolded her, and led her out into the back lawn.
"He said there was a surprise for me," she recalled. "He
made me touch it. Then he removed my blindfolds, and there the little elephant
stood. He was so lovely. I insisted we'll keep him at home, but my father said
he belonged to the government and must go to the zoo. He said we won't be able
to take good care of him, especially when he grew up. So then I said OK."
The little elephant was Kaavan, who had - until that day - been kept at Sri
Lanka's Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage (PEO), according to Ravi Corea, a US-based
Sri Lankan elephant rehabilitation expert. It is thought the year-old calf had
been gifted to Gen Haq's government as thanks for backing the Sri Lankan army
during an insurgency. The exact reasons remain murky - as does the question of
whether Kaavan was really an orphan - but we know that at some point in 1985,
the young elephant ended up at a zoo in Islamabad.
A goldmine Marghuzar
Zoo had been built just seven years earlier, but already a power vacuum had
emerged at the top, into which a number of "business mafias" had
stepped. Put simply, the authorities did not seem to care what happened
at the zoo, or to its animals. And so, a number of influential zoo
employees began offering contracts to family members, allowing them to run food
stalls and children's play areas within the attraction's grounds, as well as on
the surrounding green belts. They had other ways of making money too.
There is evidence to suggest that animals, mainly black bucks, had been
surreptitiously supplied to drinks-and-barbecue parties hosted by influential
people in the region at various times. When a group of volunteers called
the Friends of Islamabad Zoo (FIZ) started to hold periodic surveys at the zoo
in 2019, they found the animal numbers had fluctuated. When they pointed out
these anomalies, new animals suddenly appeared in enclosures. That was
not the only thing the group discovered. "There is no veterinary
facility, and no medicine supplies in the zoo," Mohammad bin Naveed, a FIZ
volunteer, says. "There's no animal health facility here; there is no room
where a surgery can be performed, and no space where a sick animal can be kept
in isolation." In the midst of all this was Kaavan, the zoo's star.
Zoochosis Kaavan's
job was to stand at the fence to entertain the crowds during opening hours,
raise his trunk as a begging bowl when his mahout, or handler, prodded him with
a bull hook, passing him the money the crowd gave him. Kaavan's nights
were spent idling around his small half-acre enclosure, about the same size as
half a football pitch and containing a hut with concrete floor. When volunteers
from Four Paws International (FPI) animal rights group compiled a report later,
they found "a dry moat with narrow concrete walls; compacted soil; no
other natural loose substrate, no trees, logs, bushes, rocks, tires or any
other structures". But at least Kaavan was not lonely. For years,
his constant companion was Saheli, an Urdu word for a 'female friend' - an
elephant brought in from Bangladesh in early 1990s. The need for such
companionship cannot be underestimated. Wildlife experts say elephants are
cognitively sophisticated and sentient, almost like humans. They have nearly
the same life span - between 60 to 70 years in the wild - and have similar
emotions, forming strong family bonds. They also mourn their dead. Saheli
died in 2012. The official version of events is that she died of a heart attack
due to the hot weather, but Mohammad bin Naveed, the a FIZ volunteer, alleges
it was actually sepsis. "At some point the unsterilised nails of
the mahout's bull hook went too far into her skin. She got gangrene and died of
a septic shock. Everyone knows this, but won't admit it," he says. Kaavan
- already bereft of the natural environment he needed - had been acting
increasingly aggressively in the years leading up to her death. He spent
prolonged periods in chains from 2000. After she died, he got worse. His
mahout warned that he was dangerous and allowed no one, including himself, to
get close to the lonely elephant. By the time the team from FPI arrived
in 2016, they found an "aggressive" animal suffering from
"zoochosis". He had "low locomotive activity, no explorative or
comfort behaviour, advanced stage of stereotypical behaviour (constant bobbing
of head)" and complete indifference to humans, "except some
begging". His physical condition was also deteriorating, FPI said,
finding "mild conjunctivitis in left eye, some less pigmented areas on
lower legs indicating old chain lesions, several cracked nails and overgrown
cuticles". Kaavan was sick, that much was clear. He was also
worryingly overweight, a result of the high sugar diet his keepers fed him. But
no one wanted to lose the zoo's star attraction. What Kaavan needed, it turned
out, was an even bigger star to come to his aid.
The song Cher
first learned of Kaavan's plight in 2016. The Oscar-winning actress and singer,
who cofounded Free the Wild, a wildlife protection charity, hired a legal team
to press for the elephant's freedom. When the court order freeing him
was announced in May, the singer called it one of the "greatest
moments" of her life. In the months since, she has chronicled his progress
on her Twitter account, where she has 3.8 million followers. But the
fight for Kaavan and the other animals in the zoo was not over. The problem was
tossed from one department to another, before finally ending up in Islamabad's
High Court. In June, the order came to close the zoo for good. But
Kaavan's fate remained uncertain. There were those, Mohammad bin Naveed
says, that took the "egotistical route" saying they would refuse to
let Kaavan go abroad, "that they would take care of him". But
as the World Wildlife Fund's Dr Uzma Khan pointed out in a recent television
interview, Kazaan's zoo was the not the only one with problems. Pakistan
doesn't have uniform standards when it comes to keeping animals. None of its
zoos is a member of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA). So
Four Paws International was invited to the country a second time and a new plan
was hatched - to fly Kaavan across Asia to Cambodia, where he could live out
the rest of his years in a "protected contact" sanctuary. There
was only one problem. Kaavan was an angry 30-something elephant with a weight
problem. Neither the anger nor the weight leant itself to an easy journey to
Cambodia. In the end, Dr Amir Khalil, the Egypt-born head of the FPI
team, stumbled his way into a solution. The team needed to make security
arrangements so they could safely assess Kaavan's physical health, which meant
Dr Khalil and a colleague had to keep the elephant in another part of the pen, requiring
them to stand around for hours waiting. It was, he says, a boring job.
"So I started to sing. And after sometime, I noticed that the elephant
started to get an interest in my voice, which no-one loved anyway, so I was
embarrassed. But then I was happy to have found a big fan, and I started to
sing to him." Soon Kaavan could be seen eating out of Dr Khalil's
hands, hugging him with his trunk as he took a bath at the pond while his new
friend sang along one of his favourite songs from the traditional pop era being
played on a portable sound system. Not long after, this once-aggressive
elephant happily followed Dr Khalil and his colleagues into the crate which had
been specially designed to carry his five-and-a-half tonne weight on an
eight-hour flight to Cambodia.
And on Sunday,
after 35 years suffering at the hands of what Dr Khalil describes as a
combination of "wrong management, lack of experienced staff, humanity
mixing with business and money, and less attention to the welfare of
animals", Kaavan will be taking flight. Cher has hinted on Twitter since
Kaavan's freedom was ordered in May that she might travel to Cambodia, and on
Friday she landed in Pakistan on her way. Her exact schedule has been kept
secret for security reasons, but she reportedly met with the prime minister,
Imran Khan, on Friday. She is expected to travel on from Pakistan to Kaavan's
new home in Cambodia, the one-million acre Kulen-Promtep Wildlife Sanctuary,
where volunteers and staff work to protect the natural habitant and house a
wide range of endangered species. Kaavan may still have problems overcoming his
psychological issues and adjusting to a natural environment, his friend Dr
Khalil says, but he "finally has a chance to be an elephant, and to live
in a place he can call home".
^ Kaavan hasn’t
had a very good start to his 35 years of life, but hopefully now he will have a
great rest of his life in his new home. ^
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