Inside the modern day Noah’s Ark built by a billionaire’s son: SUE REID visits the world’s biggest wildlife sanctuary that has saved 150,000 animals from terrible suffering

The beautiful cheetah lies unconscious on the operating table as the world’s finest vets battle to mend her shattered back leg. I watch as they pin the limb together with two titanium plates in a meticulous three-hour operation at an animal hospital in India, where cheetahs were hunted to extinction 80 years ago.

‘A maharaja killed the last three cheetahs in 1947, but he will have fired from an English-made rifle,’ muses Professor Gerhard Steenkamp, the vet who operated on the animal with an eight-strong medical team.

The young cheetah, called Dorcas, was flown here in 2024 from a South African sanctuary thousands of miles away that ran out of funds during Covid.

She has joined an extraordinary 150,000 endangered animals from 2,000 species and 44 countries, all brought to Vantara, the world’s biggest animal sanctuary and conservation centre.

It is owned by the Ambani family, the richest in India, and sits in 4,500 acres in Gujarat state in the west of the country. It has 22 state-of-the-art hospitals where animals are treated and money is no object.

The creatures, including birds and reptiles, have been found in private pet collections, or waiting for death in small cages at bushmeat markets, abandoned in war zones and at defunct zoos.

Elephants have been rescued from European and Indian circuses or from logging camps where they are forced to carry heavy loads for 18 hours a day.

Some of the creatures here were bred in captivity to be shot by illegal trophy hunters or for their body parts in a multi-billion-pound trafficking trade in ivory and traditional medicines. Others have been saved from floods, hurricanes or drought.

A ten-year-old royal Bengal Tiger called Pancham was caught up in a conflict between humans and wildlife – he killed eight Indian villagers, some of them as they collected firewood.

‘These tigers don’t actually like the taste of human flesh,’ said Dr Boon Allwin, the senior vet caring for big cats at Vantara, as the animal – growling while waving its tail – lunged at me when I peered into his enclosure during my visit last week. ‘We don’t blame him for what he did. He had tooth problems and was looking for an easy meal of domestic goat when he came across humans and pounced on them from behind.’

At least 100 calls a day come into Vantara from across the globe asking for help. With 5,000 staff, many of them scientists and biologists, the answer is nearly always yes, even with a dangerous customer like Pancham, who was spared retribution because killing tigers is illegal in India.

When a natural disaster hits, a ‘war room’ of the top brass plans how to assist animal victims efficiently and humanely before medical teams are dispatched to find them, whether in far-flung countries or in India itself. The priority is always to try to give them a new home or a guardian in their native habitat, but many are brought here to Vantara.

I was invited to visit the animal sanctuary as it prepares to exchange its groundbreaking research with London’s Natural History Museum in a ten-year agreement, which many believe will have a huge impact on our understanding of wildlife.

Top-level scientific investigations are being conducted here on a mammoth scale into wildlife health, genetics and breeding, with the end game of saving endangered animals so they can be returned to their natural habitats.

Vantara also has the world’s biggest animal biobank, having collected one million samples of blood, tissue and DNA from more than 1,000 species, including its 260 rescued Asian elephants. It is hoping this massive data trawl will help human health, too, by cracking medical puzzles such as why an elephant has multiple genes that appear to be resistant to cancer while humans possess very few of them.

The centre is collecting venom from thousands of snakes for research into how to treat their bites, which kill 140,000 people a year globally, with more than half of the victims in India.

The scale of this modern-day Noah’s Ark is overwhelming. It reeks of money and bristles with high-tech equipment.

Hundreds of millions of trees have been planted on the site, which is twice the size of Richmond Park in south-west London. Yet as recently as 2009, it was just an arid patch of land where a 30-year-old elephant called Gauri was housed by the founder Anant Ambani, the youngest son of India’s richest man.

The story told by Vantara is that Anant, on a family trip near Jaipur as a 12-year-old, spotted the distressed animal hobbling in tight leg chains with her mahout, or keeper, as she performed tricks for coins on a blisteringly hot street. He asked his father, Mukesh Ambani – worth more than £74billion as head of the vast petrochemical, energy, textile and telecommunications conglomerate Reliance Industries – to save her.

The result was that Gauri and her mahout were brought to the Reliance hub in Gujarat where an elephant sanctuary was set up, which was then expanded into Vantara. The beasts often arrive with their mahouts, who are taught that the carrot and not the stick is the way to care for them.

And yet the facility has courted considerable controversy. Some conservationists claim it is simply a private collection or zoo belonging to the son of a billionaire whose self-indulgence hit the headlines two years ago with his £450million, six-day wedding in Gujarat to Radhika Merchant, the daughter of a pharmaceutical company tycoon. And their pre-wedding celebrations in March included an occasion of unprecedented opulence at which Rihanna sang – in return for a rumoured £5.5million – and which was attended by 1,200 guests including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Although it has been cleared of wrongdoing by India’s supreme court and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), Vantara has been accused of taking in too many creatures too fast, of sidestepping strict rules on importing animals from places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates.

It is not open to the public, which has led to claims of secrecy, although when I visited the local school, financed by Reliance, ten-year-olds told me that they, like many other young Indians, often paid educational visits, then reeled off the species of animals and birds they had seen.

In one critique, the Big Cat Rescue organisation in Florida has claimed, in the face of Vantara’s denials, that the centre runs a secretive and highly controversial operation amassing an astonishing number of wild animals or ‘living trophies’, many from questionable sources. 

‘If Vantara and its backers truly care about conservation, they should focus on protecting wildlife habitats rather than accumulating captive animals,’ it added in a tart condemnation.

Furthermore, it said the proximity of Vantara to the Reliance oil refinery on the same estate ‘raises environmental and welfare concerns’. Petrochemical complexes are highly polluting, leading many to question the impact of air and water quality on the animals there.

For its part, Vantara states that the refinery is remarkable for having zero carbon emissions.

However, last week it announced a reset, shifting away from importing animals and towards supporting conservation, rescue centres, and veterinary hospitals in their countries of origin. 

It said: ‘We want to be judged not by how many animals come here, but by how many animals are helped where they belong… and the science and expertise we are able to share with the world.’

This rethink is expected to influence whether a herd of hippos, which escaped after being bought by the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, should be brought to Gujarat ‘for lifelong’ help. In April, Anant Ambani said he was ‘willing to receive’ the descendants of four exotic African animals that were illegally imported to Colombia by Escobar.

After he died in a police shoot-out in 1993, the hippos were allowed to roam and multiply along a river, where they regularly attack fishermen and other locals. They are known as the ‘cocaine hippos’ and may now stay in Colombia, with Vantara playing a pivotal role in their management to safeguard them and villagers living nearby.

Whatever the criticism, however, the animals at Vantara tug at the heartstrings. I held the hand of a rescued chimpanzee confined to a wheelchair after a stroke, threw an apple into the water for a bear that had been caged and had never learned to swim until it arrived here, saw Indian elephants recovering from hideous cruelty and now enjoying water massages in a giant jacuzzi, and giraffes that faced death during droughts in Namibia drinking at water holes in a huge paddock. 

Then there is Gracia, a two-year-old jaguar born at Vantara after her pregnant mother was rescued from a private Mexico zoo where she had been impregnated by her brother.

As a result of inbreeding, Gracia is deformed. Her hips malfunction, she drags her back legs; her internal organs are damaged, and she is in constant pain. ‘She needs a lifetime of care, and we are giving it to her,’ says Dr Allwin, Vantara’s big cat expert.

The sanctuary also cares for Dhonmati, a 50-year-old elephant tortured during a lifetime of begging on Indian streets. Her old mahout wanted to get rid of her after a car crashed into her back legs, fracturing them.

‘The bones had grown together so she was bow-legged and could not walk far,’ said Kuni Joshi, the 29-year-old senior biologist for elephants.

‘Her whole body was tipping forward to avoid the pain. She refused to open her mouth, with rotting teeth, because it hurt her. She had ulcers in her eyes.’ 

Very slowly, Dhonmati has recovered. Her teeth and eyes have been successfully treated.

She has also been introduced to another rescued elephant, 50-year-old Champa, who is blind after her eyes were poked and pricked by her mahout. This is a common practice done to break the animal’s spirit and render her docile enough to be a tourist elephant that draws crowds – in Champa’s case for nearly half a century.

They are inseparable. ‘Champa uses Dhonmati as her guide, following her everywhere because she can smell her,’ explained Ms Joshi. ‘If we had not rescued Dhonmati, she would have been abandoned and died of starvation.’

As for Dorcas, she is a ‘king cheetah’ and one of the rarest animals in the world. A genetic mutation means her coat and 3ft tail are covered in large blotches and stripes rather than the spots of a standard cheetah.

She is recovering from her operation. I watched her being carried, under anaesthetic and covered in tubes, to the theatre with all the care a human patient would receive. One of the vets was going on to give a ‘tooth overhaul’ to a chameleon at Vantara later in the day.

Twenty-four hours after the op, cheetah behaviourist Craig Gouws, who is in charge of Dorcas, explained: ‘I have been watching her every two hours – she has started hobbling around, she has taken the antibiotics and pain relievers I offered her on a piece of raw meat. We have removed all the furniture in her enclosure so she cannot knock her leg, which was broken when she put it down a hole in the ground during the hours after her first-ever mating.’

Now Vantara is waiting to see if Dorcas is pregnant. If tests in two weeks are positive, her cub is likely to become part of an effort by Vantara and government officials to restore the fastest land animal to the wild in India.

On the last day at this extraordinary place, I am told that an emergency operation is underway to rescue Joymoti, a 53-year-old elephant who has spent a lifetime carrying timber on her back at a logging camp in Assam state, north-eastern India, 1,800 miles and a six-day road drive away.

She fell into a river during floods in July and was swept along for 40 miles before being pulled ashore by locals.

A heartbreaking video of her in the river, with only the tip of her trunk above the waterline as she struggles to breathe, has been watched online around the world.

The Vantara team took six hours to persuade the traumatised creature to enter a crate when they found her. She was airlifted to Gujarat and driven in a special elephant ambulance to the centre for emergency medical help.

Her crate was lowered to the ground by a forklift, the doors were hauled open by vets, and Joymoti looked out cautiously at her new paradise. Like the other animals here, she was safe at last.