In Memory of Mohan - Mohan's Story

1 November 2017

 - Our journey with Mohan started long before he arrived at the Elephant Conservation and Care Center. For more than a year, his hunched figure, weak and emaciated, had been in the middle of our most complicated and controversial rescue operations — and the fierce legal battle that accompanied them. After a volatile mob thwarted our first rescue attempt, repeated delays pushed back a second one even as the informants we’d deployed to keep an eye on him sent images of a gradually deteriorating elephant that left us all increasingly alarmed with every passing day. The newspapers begin to call Mohan “the world’s unluckiest elephant,” and as hard as we were willing to fight for his freedom, it really did feel like fate had dealt him the cruelest of hands. Five decades of loneliness and abuse after being snatched from his herd and a life of freedom, Mohan’s life of horror seemed like the cruelest of jokes.

By the time we had the legal paperwork to undertake another rescue attempt, we were afraid he wouldn’t survive the rescue and the journey home — this magnificent being reduced to a defeated shell of an elephant. But we proceeded, fearing the alternative was worse. It was the stroke of midnight on the 22nd of September, when Mohan gingerly boarded the Wildlife SOS elephant ambulance. The entire rescue team, hearts racing and absolutely silent, could suddenly breathe again, smiles impossible to control. It seemed as if things were finally looking up for the world’s unluckiest elephant.