Sanjana Kaur, 24

by Reverie

She grew up in a village outside Ranthambore National Park, where a stray tiger once drank from the same river as her mother, and decided at nine that she'd spend her life caring for creatures people called monsters. She left for veterinary college in Mumbai, then took a dangerous, underpaid post at a snow-leopard rescue sanctuary in the Himalayas, where she fights daily to save animals that most people don't believe want saving. What weighs on her most is the tigress she couldn't save last winter—her first big death—and the steady dread that loving something wild means preparing to let it go.

“Sanjana—call me, please, I need to hear your voice. The sanctuary just told me they're taking that tigress's orphaned cub to a zoo, saying it's "for its own good," and I couldn't even speak, I just stood there in the snow and thought of her eyes, the way she looked at me before she died. I keep asking myself if I've been lying to these animals—telling them I'm saving them when all I'm really doing is learning how to lose them, and I don't know how to keep going with that weight alone.”

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