The Fate of the Elephant

Douglas H. Chadwick
Sierra Club Books, 1994 - 492 pages

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With a single hand, he can pull two palm trees to the ground. If he had two hands, he could
tear the sky . . . So unfolds a Yoruba poem celebrating the largest, most powerful, and one of
the smartest creatures to walk the planet: the elephant. In this richly detailed exploration of the
natural history and troubled fate of both the African and Asian species of elephant, noted wildlife
biologist and author Douglas Chadwick travels the world to acquaint us with these awesome
giants. Through visits to India, Siberia, Botswana, Thailand, Malaysia, Kenya, and even an
American zoo, Chadwick illustrates the pivotal role the elephant plays in shaping and balancing
not only the ecosystems it calls home, but also the livelihoods of a wide array of people. We
travel to East Africa and join elephant families on the savannas of Amboseli Reserve in the
shadow of Kilimanjaro. In the thick jungles of the Congo Basin, Chadwick leads us down pygmy
footpaths on the trail of the elusive forest elephant.

In Asia we experience a day in the life of a working elephant at an Indian timber camp, and
take a raft trip to transplant problem elephants to remote areas of the Malaysian rainforest. At
the zoo, we watch a four-ton artist take brush in trunk and paint a canvas with delicate strokes.
In each place we visit, Chadwick reveals the elephant as a playful, intelligent being, full of
surprises and ready to smash the narrow confines from which we traditionally view animals.
As he shows us how similar elephants are to humans - they travel in closely knit families,
learn from each other, look after their ill and elderly, mourn their dead, and communicate
through a vocabulary of audible and subsonic sounds that addup to a surprisingly nuanced and
expressive language - he leads us to rethink our definition of and approach to conservation.

Chadwick also introduces us to the people whose lives are intimately connected with the
elephant's - mahouts, researchers, loggers, royal white elephant metaphysicians, veterinarians,
poachers, and some of the world's most talented ivory carvers. He illustrates how the elephant
is integral to the history and mythology of the peoples with whom it has lived, and shows us
why, despite that bond, elephants and humans have come into inevitable conflict as they vie
for the same crucial tracts of land. Discussing the combination of factors that have pushed the
elephant to the brink of extinction - the drastic loss of habitat, the ruthless pursuit of ivory, the
unstable societies in crowded nations - Chadwick shows us why the fate of the elephant is a
potent metaphor for our own fate, and makes a compelling case for acting immediately to save
the elephant from oblivion, lest we destroy a creature we are only beginning to understand.
From Publishers Weekly (amazon)

On assignment for National Geographic magazine, Chadwick (A Beast the Color of Winter)
spent most of two years observing elephants in American zoos and throughout Africa, India
and southeast Asia. He also followed the ivory trade, visiting carvers and shops in Tokyo,
Delhi, Hong Kong and Bangkok. His marvelous account depicts elephants at work and at
play, profiles the people who work with them and sadly notes that their habitat is in decline.
Chadwick's description of his African adventures covers much of the same ground as Ian and
Oria DouglasHamilton's Battle for the Elephants; his report on the Asian elephants is especially
welcome, since their story has been generally neglected. Chadwick visits an elephant reserve
and a training camp in India; an expert on white elephants takes him to see the King's herd
in Bangkok; in Malaysia, he watches a rescue team capture and relocate a wild elephant. In
addition to telling many fascinating stories, Chadwick reminds us that the elephant's future
is bleak: too many people, too little land and unstable goverments all threaten the animal's
survival.

The Elephant's Secret Sense:

The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa

Caitlin O'Connell
University of Chicago Press, 2008 - Science - 264 pages

The largest land animal is the African elephant, a creature so vast that it is impossible to
ignore. And yet, what do we really know about elephants? Field biologist O'Connell was in
Namibia working on nonlethal methods for deterring elephants from raiding local people's crops.
One night she was observing a young elephant sneaking past her house and inadvertently
dropped her book. The startled elephant ran off literally on her tiptoes. On another location,
while observing elephants at a waterhole, the author saw the matriarch suddenly turn, flatten
her ears, and lift one leg off the ground. Several other females then faced the same direction,
and soon another elephant appeared. Could elephants feel vibrations through the ground,
literally "listening" with their feet? In a riveting account of scientific discovery both in the field and
in the laboratory, O'Connell tells of how she and her colleagues studied seismic communication
in elephants. O'Connell's love for her research subjects and her quest for understanding them is
integral to her story, making for an addictive narrative.
From Publishers Weekly (amazon)
Naturalist O'Connell's memoir of her 14 years researching the complexities of elephant behavior
is a successful combination of science and soulfulness, explaining her groundbreaking theory
of how elephants use seismic communication; she also sympathetically illuminates current
social and ecological conditions in Africa. O'Connell's original goal in 1992 was to spend a year
driving from South Africa to Kenya, but then she was hired for a three-year study of elephants
in an area of northeastern Namibia, "where violent death is as much a part of the landscape as
the capricious nature of rain." Fascinated by the "particular way that elephants seemed to be
listening with their feet," she soon realized that the elephants were communicating with sound
waves "that travel within the surface of the ground as opposed to the air." Her efforts over the
next decade to prove this "unexpected and controversial" hypothesis took her "to the bayous
of Texas, the Nevada desert, southern India, northern Zimbabwe, the Oakland Zoo, and then
back to the scrub desert" of Namibia. Her account is studded with sympathetic insights and well-
turned phrases, such as her delight when "100 tons of pachyderm pass by, almost tiptoeing,
heads bobbing in their Groucho Marx gait."

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Elephants on the Edge:

What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
G. A. Bradshaw
Yale University Press, 2010 - 352 pages

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Drawing on accounts from India to Africa and California to Tennessee, and on research in
neuroscience, psychology, and animal behavior, G. A. Bradshaw explores the minds, emotions,
and lives of elephants. Wars, starvation, mass culls, poaching, and habitat loss have reduced
elephant numbers from more than ten million to a few hundred thousand, leaving orphans bereft
of the elders who would normally mentor them. As a consequence, traumatized elephants have
become aggressive against people, other animals, and even one another; their behavior is
comparable to that of humans who have experienced genocide, other types of violence, and
social collapse. By exploring the elephant mind and experience in the wild and in captivity,
Bradshaw bears witness to the breakdown of ancient elephant cultures. All is not lost. People
are working to save elephants by rescuing orphaned infants and rehabilitating adult zoo and
circus elephants, using the same principles psychologists apply in treating humans who have
survived trauma. Bradshaw urges us to support these and other models of elephant recovery
and to solve pressing social and environmental crises affecting all animals, human or not.

From Publishers Weekly (amazon)

This thoughtful book by animal trauma specialist Bradshaw draws analogies between human
and animal culture to illustrate the profound breakdown occurring in elephant societies.
Extraordinarily sensitive and social, elephants' survival has long depended on their matriarchal
lineage—now sundered by culling the herds, which disrupts the hierarchy—and their psyches
have been broken by prolonged isolation and separation, painful hooks used as training
tools and general cruelty. Captured elephants meet the criteria of the psychiatirc handbook
DSM for suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on research on animal
trauma, concentration camp survivors and Konrad Lorenz–type ethology, Bradshaw makes a
multidisciplinary condemnation of elephant abuse and celebrates those working on rehabilitating
and healing the animals—including an elephant massage therapist and the owners of an
elephant sanctuary in the Tennessee hills. In the end, anthropomorphizing isn't the issue;
Bradshaw says that instead of giving animals human feelings, we should observe that they have
feelings that correlate with what we may feel in similar circumstances. With its heartbreaking
findings and irrefutable conclusions, this book bears careful reading and consideration.

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Elephant memories:
thirteen years in the life of an elephant family : with a new afterword

Cynthia Moss
University of Chicago Press, 2000 - Nature - 364 pages

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Cynthia Moss has studied the elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park for over twenty-
seven years. Her long-term research has revealed much of what we now know about these
complex and intelligent animals. Here she chronicles the lives of the members of the T families
led by matriarchs Teresia, Slit Ear, Torn Ear, Tania, and Tuskless. With a new afterword
catching up on the families and covering current conservation issues, Moss's story will continue
to fascinate animal lovers.

From Publishers Weekly (amazon)

Amboseli National Park, near Mt. Kilimanjaro in southern Kenya, is home ground to some 600
elephants; this herd has been relatively free from human interference and was a major focus
for field study. Moss, author of Portraits in the Wild, has been involved with the elephants of
Amboseli since 1973; she and her colleagues have made a substantial contribution to our
knowledge of elephant biology and behavior. Here, she follows one extended family through 13
years of good times and bad times, observing details of their daily lives. The book is organized
by year and topic: each chapter begins with a synthesized narrative that introduces a single
phase of lifesuch as mating, migration, social behavior, births and calves (this is the first study
of elephant newborns and their development)that relates to family history. This is a captivating
story of individual animals', rather than the author's, adventures. Moss affirms the old tale about
elephants assisting one of their own who is injured or dying; she also reports that they recognize
bare and bleached bones of their species. Any reader interested in animals will be captivated.

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