Shanthi was a female elephant born in Sri Lanka around 1975 and cared for as an orphan at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage. In 1976 she was sent to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., as a gift from the children of Sri Lanka to the children of America, and was symbolically handed to Amy Carter in April 1977. She became perhaps the world’s most studied elephant and helped pioneer artificial insemination in elephants; her son Kandula (2001) was conceived this way. She was euthanised on 26 June 2020, aged about 45, after decades of osteoarthritis.