Sri Lanka to gift two female elephants to Pakistan !!
Currently in Pakistan there is an elephant named Kaavan. For the past three decades, since he was a baby of between one and two years old, he has been held in conditions not fitting for any being. Considered property, he was a diplomatic gift from the Sri Lankan government to the Pakistan government in 1985. Many people are aware of Kaavan and his story of being tightly chained almost his entire life in deplorable conditions in the Islamabad Zoo. [...] Elephants like the NhRP’s clients Beulah, Karen, Minnie, and the elephant we have been fighting for in Pakistan, Kaavan, are captured from the wild and from their families. Herd members are very often killed in the process of trying to protect the babies. Traumatized babies are shipped from their native habitat to be physically abused and mentally "broken" until they submit to a life as a docile "attraction" of one sort or another in zoos or circuses, giving tourist rides, kept as status symbols, or owned or rented for religious and cultural festivals. All this is even worse when we consider that elephants are scientifically proven to be one of the most intelligent species on earth; they are highly social and form lifelong bonds, are known to show empathy, are body-aware, and many would argue, self-aware.