Growing up in Mumbai, Pooja Advani, canine behaviourist and founder of Doggiie Dog World, a pet wellness centre, recalls how it was common to find elephants painted in bright colours, trekking amid heavy traffic with their mahouts collecting fruits or coins offered by passersbys. “As somebody who has cared for streeties since childhood, something about this spectacle didn’t feel right,” says Advani, who’d routinely bring home injured cats, dogs and birds and nurse them back to health. The animal lover later went to try multiple career options, only to revert to her biggest love: animal welfare. She’s now trained her lens on conservation, especially of rehabilitation of elephants from human slavery.

Advani has adopted two elephants that are being rehabilitated in a wildlife reserve at the Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. The late Daphne Sheldrick founded the organisation in 1977 and has helped save hundreds of elephants and other animals, rehabilitating them and returning them to the wild. Advani is also remotely fostering two more elephants at The Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand (WFFT) sanctuary, which rescues and rehabilitates abused,  sick  and discarded animals from the entertainment, tourism or industry, and even from wildlife trade. These animals are completely domesticated since a very a young age and do not have the skills to survive in the wild. .  In 2018, Advani had raised R5 lakh through an online fundraising campaign towards the efforts of Wildlife SOS India to save a six-year-old, baby elephant that was in captivity and being “broken” to serve humans. “To get these wild animals to interact with humans, they are put through an extraordinarily cruel breaking process that renders them submissive to their human trainers. These surviving animals are wounded, hungry and isolated.