The stranger side of the animal world, gathered for your Wednesday.

The pink elephant and the art world that wouldn’t let it go

It began as a photoshoot. A Russian photographer, inspired by Jaipur’s identity as the Pink City, painted a 67-year-old captive elephant named Chanchal in vivid gulal pink and posed a model alongside her against the backdrop of an abandoned Ganesha temple. The shoot lasted about ten minutes. The paint was washed off. The images sat on Instagram through December 2025, drawing little attention.

Then March 2026 arrived, the photos went viral, and India’s internet had opinions. Loud ones.

The outrage deepened when word spread that Chanchal had died in February — though the postmortem told a rather inconvenient story for the most dramatic version of events: cardiac arrest due to old age, confirmed by the veterinary panel and entirely unrelated to the photoshoot, which had taken place months earlier. Chanchal was around 70 years old. Her mahout noted she had been retired from rides for some time.

None of this has quieted the debate. PETA India this week sent a formal letter to the photographer asking her to withdraw the prints from sale, or alternatively donate the proceeds to an elephant sanctuary. The Rajasthan Forest Department has opened an investigation into whether proper permissions were obtained. And the photographer, for her part, posted again on 5 April to address what she described as misinformation — while, in a move that perhaps did not help her cause, inviting supporters to rally behind the hashtag #supportArtistJuliaBuruleva.

The broader conversation the story has ignited — about captive elephants at Jaipur’s Amer Fort, about using animals as artistic props, about the gap between online outrage and ecological reality — is arguably more valuable than any single photoshoot.

Sources: Gulf News, Free Press Journal, Telangana Today