Islamabad Zoo turns into a rehabilitation centre for Pakistani wildlife

Before it was forced to close over its "intolerable" treatment of animals, the Islamabad Zoo was home to neglected elephants and underfed lions pacing back and forth behind the bars of their enclosures.

Now, four years later, it is a rehabilitation centre for Pakistani wildlife, providing a refuge for motherless leopard cubs, tigers seized from owners who kept them as status symbols, and bears forced to dance — or fight — for the amusement of crowds.

"The whole energy of the place has changed ever since the zoo was emptied... The care shows, look around," Rina Saeed, the head of Islamabad Wildlife Management Board (IWMB), told reporters.

The zoo found international notoriety in 2016, when the singer Cher launched a campaign to remove its shackled Asian elephant Kaavan, the last in the country and dubbed the world's loneliest elephant. But Kaavan's treatment wasn't an isolated incident - two lions died at the facility when zookeepers attempted to force them from their pen by setting fire to piles of hay.

And over the years, hundreds of animals listed on the zoo's inventory simply vanished. Pakistan's climate change ministry said it was "seriously concerned" about the "intolerable and inhumane" treatment of animals at the zoo in 2020 - the same year the courts ordered it shut and Kaavan was moved to Cambodia.

Within months of its closure, a small rescue centre began to take root at the facility, and now evidence of its past as a tourist attraction is fading - silence hangs over the empty, overgrown parking lot and the shabby ticket stand sits idle next to a swing set. "Now it is a proper rehabilitation centre with over 50 animals," Saeed said, adding that the team had rescued more than 380 animals.

The IWMB team rescues animals from across the country, recently taking in two indigenous leopard cubs poached from their mother, bears once forced to fight dogs in underground competitions and monkeys made to dance for tips.

Members of Four Paws International shift female  Asian black bear ‘Anila’ after giving her a tranquilliser before a surgery. AFP

Amir Khalil, a veterinarian who directs the global animal welfare organisation Four Paws, which oversaw Kaavan's relocation, recently made an emotional return to the zoo, saying it "now holds hope."

Vets from the Austria-based NGO had come to the centre to see after three black bears whose claws had been removed by their previous owners, treating them in the shadow of an abandoned Ferris wheel in the zoo's former cafe - now a makeshift clinic.

"This place is unrecognisable," Khalil told reporters while inspecting one of the animals, an overweight former dancing bear called Anila. Anila was also suffering from a nose infection from a ring pierced through her snout to help keep her under control. "We hope this place turns out to be a place for animals with a better future," Khalil said.

Agence France-Presse