At an April 2 1977 ceremony at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., she was symbolically handed over by Punitha Gunaratne, the daughter of a Sri Lankan Embassy official, to Amy Carter, the daughter of President Jimmy Carter.

[4] Shanthi was the mother of Kumari, a female who was born in 1993 but died in 1995 of elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.

[2] Shanthi, after completing her 45th anniversary, was euthanized on June 26, 2020 at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., after decades of increasingly debilitating osteoarthritis.

“After decades of managing and treating Shanthi’s osteoarthritis, animal care staff recently noted that her physical condition had irreversibly declined,” the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute said in a statement.

She was the first of her kind to receive therapies including injections of a protein serum to slow disease progression.