Free sarus from Kanpur zoo captivity, tweets PGV

KANPUR: After SP national president Akhilesh Yadav and BJP MP Varun Gandhi, now Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has demanded to free the Sarus bird kept at the Allen Forest zoo of Kanpur.
Priyanka uploaded on her official Twitter handle on Saturday the video of Arif’s meeting with the sarus he had nurtured, at Allen Forest and tweeted, “A bird likes to live in the open sky. But its freedom was taken away. What kind of insensitivity is this on the part of the government that a sarus was not only taken away from its protector but also its open sky was snatched away from it.”
The sarus crane was taken away from Arif, a native of Mandhka Majre Aurangabad village in Amethi and was brought to the Allen Forest Zoo on March 25, where it remained quarantined for a fortnight till April 9.
Arif had saved the life of the injured sarus crane in February 2022. After it recovered fully in two months, the sarus, regarded as the least of the social crane species, chose to stay back and formed a close bond with Arif.
Soon Arif got into the limelight and his videos and photos with the sarus started doing the rounds on social media. On March 21, the forest department took away the bird and sent it to Samaspur bird sanctuary in Rae Bareli, but it disappeared. On March 22, the bird was found half-a-kilometre away from Samaspur.
Later, an order was passed by chief wildlife warden Sunil Chaudhary and the bird was shifted from Rae Bareli to Kanpur. Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav, who had visited Arif in Amethi, on March 28 visited Kanpur zoo along with Arif to enquire about the bird’s well-being.
Since the sarus was quarantined, they were shown live footage of the bird at its enclosure inside the zoo.