Islamabad | Kaavan was a cute baby elephant when Sri Lanka offered him to Pakistan in 1985. 35 years later, an obese pachyderm, after years of abuse, is about to leave Islamabad, illustrating the indignity of zoos Pakistani.
In May, justice, outraged by the treatment of animals at the capital’s zoo, ordered the transfer of some of them to milder skies. Two months later, two lions died, probably from stress, when they were taken out of their narrow cage. Ostriches accompanied them to the paradise of unhappy animals.
The bear, stricken with a tumor, is still spinning around in a tiny enclosure. When Kaavan, unwilling hero of this tired menagerie, will soon bow out.
Her salvation came from a Californian veterinarian, Samar Khan, who was outraged a few years ago while visiting the zoo. “I was horrified to discover that he had been in chains for 28 years,” she recalls, interviewed by AFP. The singer Cher then seized the cause of the elephant.
After a fierce struggle by Pakistani animal rights activists, deliverance is near. On Friday, a team of international experts armed with tranquilizer darts checked Kaavan, the first since 2016, before his scheduled departure for the forests of Cambodia.
Attracted by a vat of bananas and bread, then anesthetized three times, the pachyderm was generally satisfactory.
“He is in good general condition (…) but he is totally obese,” comments the chief veterinarian Frank Goeritz, who works for the Austrian animal rescue protection group Four Paws International.
“He gets bored ”
“He weighs too much and his feet are horrible,” he continues, while humming. My way, by Frank Sinatra, to calm the elephant, whose nails, cracked and malformed, require medical attention.
Kaavan ate up to 200 kilos of cane per day and was deprived of intellectual stimuli, hence his “stereotypical” behavior, Goeritz explains. The elephant often just turns its head and trunk from side to side for hours on end, fueling controversies and questions about its sanity.
“He gets bored. He definitely needs physical and mental challenges, ”says the veterinarian, who has previously treated elephants across Africa.
A transport crate must now be built and Kaavan will have to get used to it before he can be transported by cargo plane to the Cambodian game reserve where he must rebuild his life. His partner Saheli, who arrived from Sri Lanka in 1990, died of gangrene in 2012.
Pakistani zoos all over the country stand out for their poor facilities and poor animal care. In 2018, 30 of them had perished in the brand new zoo in Peshawar (northwest), including three rare baby snow leopards.
In February, the body of a teenager was found in the lion enclosure of an animal park in Lahore (East) where he worked.
Animal rights are far from being a priority in Pakistan. Hundreds of exotic animals have been imported or bred there in recent years. So that rich Pakistanis can parade on social media with lions in their luxury SUVs.