The big elephant is very big and very lonely. Its loneliness is weighed in tons; its bigness is weighed in loneliness. Kaavan is his name, and he was the only Asian elephant in all of Pakistan until the fall of 2020. He now lives at an animal sanctuary elsewhere on the continent thanks, in part, to Cher.
It’s all part of a documentary, Cher & the Loneliest Elephant, which will be released on Thursday, April 22 on Paramount+. For the doc, the performer traveled to Islamabad last November to help free this creature from a zoo, where he had been kept in terrible conditions for 35 years. He’s a widower of some years, too, after his mate died of neglect (gangrene officially) in 2012.
“I never actually intended to [get involved], I just got swept up in it because the kids on my Twitter feed started sending me these pictures and it was all ‘free Kaavan, free Kaavan,’” Cher explained, according to the Daily Mail.
Propelled by strangers on social media, she did what a celebrity does maybe best extracurricularly—signal-boosted the cause (she recorded a song about Kaavan, but that didn’t really move the needle), attached herself to a project, cofounded a little organization—Free the Wild—and assembled a team. Together with the animal welfare organization Four Paws and veterinarian Dr. Amir Khalil, the real brains of the operation, she helped rehome Kaavan in a Cambodian wildlife sanctuary.
Now, this was in November 2020, which was a pretty terrible time what without the hope of vaccinations made real. Was this essential travel? Did this count? What did the CDC board of infectious disease doctors say about Cher traveling across oceans so that she might sing a little Frank Sinatra to this godforsaken elephant before sending it on its way?
I guess you’d have to ask Kaavan if it was all worth it. Or, I don’t know, in lieu of speaking directly with him—he’s been through enough already—we can simply see ourselves in this large, charismatic mammal? Maybe a better way of putting it is that we can’t help but see ourselves in sweet Kaavan, projection a condition of our lonely existences. There he is trapped at home, diagnosed by veterinarians as both overweight and malnourished. Mostly, he spent his time rocking back and forth. I can see how it might be easy to give Cher the greenlight to go ahead despite a pandemic and whatever else. The very definition of essential.
Deliver us, Cher. Please deliver all of us, the loneliest elephants.
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