In 2009, four African elephant calves captured in Tanzania arrived in Karachi through an animal trader. Fifteen years later, two are dead — Noor Jehan at 17 in 2023, Sonia at roughly 19 in December 2024 — and the surviving pair, Madhubala and Malika, have both been diagnosed with tuberculosis. The trajectory is not ambiguous: these animals were placed into a system that could not sustain them, and each intervention has arrived too late to prevent the next death. The core failure is structural, not individual. Karachi Zoo, run by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, has not procured any animals in two decades, according to Mayor Murtaza Wahab. The elephants predate his tenure. The zoo lacks specialized veterinary capacity for megafauna, adequate enclosure space, and consistent nutritional programmes. When Madhubala was finally relocated to Safari Park in November 2024 to reunite with her sisters, Sonia died twelve days later from a bacterial infection linked to an advanced foot abscess — a condition that, as Four Paws veterinarian Amir Khalil noted, does not develop overnight. The activist layer that has emerged around these elephants is genuine but structurally constrained. Jude Allen, who left his corporate career after bonding with Noor Jehan during her final days, now leads the "I Am Noor Jehan" campaign. He helped prepare Madhubala's transport, designed enclosure improvements, and introduced enrichment activities including football sessions. But Allen and other volunteers operate without institutional authority. He says he raised concerns about Sonia's weight loss and swelling before her death, and those warnings were not adequately acted upon. The gap between volunteer devotion and institutional capacity is the defining feature of this story. Four Paws, the international organisation that helped relocate Kaavan from Islamabad to Cambodia in 2020, has provided veterinary expertise and assessments. Khalil reports Madhubala has recovered 85 percent of her walking ability after losing more than 200 kilograms and is no longer testing positive for TB. But Four Paws is an external partner, not a permanent custodian, and their presence in Pakistan is episodic. The legal framework technically exists. Former Islamabad High Court Chief Justice Athar Minallah's landmark 2020 ruling declared that animals have rights, enabled Kaavan's transfer, and led to the closure of Islamabad Zoo and the relocation of all 878 animals there. That judgement was never appealed and remains binding law. Minallah argues Madhubala has the right to live in an environment meeting her social, behavioural, and psychological needs. Yet enforcement is absent — Sindh's top wildlife official, Javed Maher, says he offered hundreds of rural acres for the elephants to live freely, but they remain in a 14-hectare Safari Park enclosure where visitors approach and feed them directly. The deeper context is a country in crisis. Pakistan faces profound human hardship — poverty, displacement, underfunded public services — and municipal zoo infrastructure competes for resources against far more urgent needs. The Karachi Metropolitan Corporation is not a wildlife management agency. It is a city government trying to run a zoo it never wanted, with animals it did not acquire, using expertise it does not have. The elephants are a symptom of a system where responsibility was never properly assigned. Safari Park was supposed to be different from the zoo. Allen says he helped develop the new enclosure, but the facility functions as a tourist attraction where the public interacts directly with the animals. "What was meant to be a sanctuary became a zoo," he says. The question now is whether Madhubala and Malika will follow Noor Jehan and Sonia, or whether international pressure, legal enforcement, and sustained veterinary intervention can break the pattern before both surviving elephants are dead.
