Billy Arjan Singh elephants, located at Tiger Haven, Dudhwa forest, in Palia Kalan, India . The last elephant left in 1982. Billy Arjan Singh elephants closed down in 2010.
Billy’s campaign headquarters was Tiger Haven, a farmhouse on the edge of Dudhwa forest from where he waged war on the authorities in defense of India’s wild places. He believed that as long as the big cats flourished as apex predators, a healthy jungle would be secured – he advocated for Dudhwa to become a sanctuary, and led a controversial experiment to supplement its depleting leopard and tiger population by rehabilitating captive cats back into the wild...With Pan Am colleagues we helped Billy ship a young tigress named Tara in a steel crate from Twycross Zoo, arriving securely strapped onto the back of his elephant Sitara. On Billy’s death at Tiger Haven aged 92 on 1 January 2010, his relative Rohit Brijnath remembered: “Legacy is not easily defined. But we can say of Billy that he was a first and an original, a tiger explorer who built an entire life around a single cause.”