KARACHI – Noor Jehan, the African bush elephant, should have been in her prime. She was just a teenager, about 17. But a mysterious incident left her painfully dragging about on her two front legs. The zoo neglected to help her until animal rights activists raised the alarm on social media. Then, in mid-April, she fell into a concrete pool in her dusty enclosure. She had to be winched out with a crane and could no longer stand independently. Zookeepers laid Noor Jehan on a mound of sand beneath the only tree in her enclosure.
“We are all absolutely heartbroken,” said Mahera Omar, cofounder of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society, which dispatched volunteers and local vets to bolster Noor Jehan’s care, overseen by the Austrian-based animal charity, Four Paws International. “We are trying to do our best to keep her comfortable.” Volunteer Jude Allen urged the elephant to eat stalks of sugar cane. “Good girl,” he crooned, “You can do it.”
Noor Jehan’s tragedy captivated Pakistan, with journalists delivering rapid-fire updates. In her enclosure – roughly the size of four tennis courts, a section was lopped off with rope to accommodate the some dozen television news cameras that trained on her for days.
And for some, the elephant’s plight became something more. “Noor Jehan has become a symbol for the state of our own country” says Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a conservationist with an outsize profile as the grandson and nephew of two of Pakistan’s most beloved prime ministers. He was volunteering to bathe and feed Noor Jehan on a recent day. “She has been caged, starved, abused, exploited. And this is the state of Pakistan.”
Despite the last-ditch efforts to save her, the elephant died on April 22.
Poached from the wild, popular in Pakistan
Noor Jehan was always big news.
When she first arrived at the zoo as a plump toddler, nearly 15 years ago, Pakistanis flocked to see her. To add to her allure, zoo officials named her after the beloved Pakistani diva Noor Jehan….
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