NEW YORK, NY.- More than a century ago, New York City’s Meatpacking District teemed with large animals, most of them bound for a bloody end. Now, herds of huge creatures are once again gathered on this downtown Manhattan neighborhood’s cobblestone streets, but these are taking part in a new and joyful journey.

They are the life-size sculptures of “The Great Elephant Migration,” a public-art installation of a hundred animal models, each based on an individual living elephant in the densely populated Nilgiri Hills region of southern India. Handmade by indigenous artisans using dried lantana camara, an invasive, toxic shrub that has been destroying wildlife habitats, the sculpted elephants occupy some 12,000 square feet of the district’s plazas and walkways. Arriving in New York as part of a U.S. tour, the exhibition raises funds for conservation — and not just of elephants, whose three species are all endangered.

The show mimics “how it is when you’re in India, with the elephants walking through the streets,” said Dodie Kazanjian, founder of the Rhode Island nonprofit Art&Newport, which organized the exhibition’s American tour with Elephant Family USA, a conservation group. Although the weatherproofed sculptures are stationary, “the interaction with people has been an important part,” she said during a video interview.

The installation, which opened in the Meatpacking District on Friday and runs through Oct. 20, will be accompanied by public events, including a conservation-themed panel discussion Tuesday at 9 a.m. in Chelsea Market; and a neighborhood parade Sept. 23. A related show of works about elephants and migration by artist Hadi Falapishi will open at 82 Gansevoort St. later this month.

And yes, you can touch the elephants.

“We’re trying to re-create that feeling of awe and wonder and connection,” Ruth Ganesh, a trustee of Elephant Family USA, said in a recent interview in the district. However, she added with a laugh, “we are hoping that no one tries to climb on them.”

The sculptures, which are for sale — they range in price from $8,000 for a typical 5-foot-tall, 220-pound baby elephant to $22,000 for a 15-foot-tall, 770-pound tusker — have attracted buyers like conservationist Edith McBean and cosmetics executive Sylvie Chantecaille, who belong to the project’s Matriarchy, a group of influential women helping to promote it. (Cher is also a member.) Intended for locations like gardens, country estates, business grounds and schools, the works are made in multiples, so a sold piece can be replaced by an identical elephant during the yearlong tour.

“If we sell 1,000 elephants over the next year,” Ganesh said, “we’ll hit the $10 million mark. And that’s the target.”

Corporate sponsors have helped finance the $2 million exhibition, which debuted in Britain and India before opening in Newport in July. After Manhattan, it will travel to Miami; the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana; and Los Angeles. The net proceeds, which will also comprise private donations and sales of elephant-themed merchandise, will benefit 22 nongovernmental conservation organizations worldwide, including the Coexistence Consortium, Lion Guardians and Indigenous Led, a Native American group. Sales at each site also help support a local nonprofit organization; in New York, it is the Wild Bird Fund.

But the elephant project’s organizers emphasize that it is more than a huge fundraiser; it is itself an engine of conservation. The creative process not only removes invasive lantana to make it into art material but also converts tons of it into biochar, a form of nutrient-rich carbon that is then buried in India, improving the soil. By using solar-powered storage and electric trucks whenever possible, the tour seeks to be carbon neutral.

The project’s team said the installation also illustrated a more indigenous approach to wildlife: coexistence. That goal may seem even more elusive now, when there is heightened sensitivity to wild-animal encounters, and as Namibia, a drought-stricken Southern African nation, is planning to cull elephant herds for food.

“We don’t want to think of conservation in the traditional way of, ‘Let’s preserve these little pockets of nature while we destroy the rest of the earth,’” said Tarsh Thekaekara, an Indian scientist and elephant researcher who, with Ganesh, founded the Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 indigenous artisans creating the sculptures.

“Elephants are kind of very iconic, in that being the largest land mammal in the world, they’re still able to live in tea and coffee plantations alongside people as well,” he added during a video interview from the Nilgiri Hills. “So that’s the story we’re trying to tell, that we can’t only think about nature as separated from ourselves.”

People living in and around the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve have learned to recognize and accommodate all the local elephants, from the shy types to what Thekaekara (pronounced Tie-CAKE-ur-a) called “the bold and the blasé.” The animals have become models for the sculptures in a process that begins with taking detailed photographs, which designer Shubhra Nayar, Thekaekara’s wife, translates into drawings. The indigenous artisans, who are paid for each sculpture, then make a steel body structure that they overlay with lantana strips, adding cast-resin eyes and wooden tusks and toenails. Details like eye color, ear shape and trunk position reflect each elephant’s individuality.

Ganesh said she hoped “The Great Elephant Migration” would show that conservation is “not just about science and data, it’s also about culture.”

“And indigenous perspectives towards animals,” she said, “in that they were, they are, our relatives.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.