A new book by G.A. Bradshaw, Elephants On the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity (Amazon)
Description:
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.
“Bradshaw brings home to us forcefully what we should have realized long ago: that destroying the family life of highly social, intelligent animals leads inevitably to misery among individual survivors and pathological misbehaviour among the group.”-J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2003
“African peoples and wildlife have been bound together in a delicate network of interdependence since ancient times. The arrival of colonialism tore apart these bonds: human brother now fights against elephant brother, and mothers of both species mourn. Elephants on the Edge is an urgent call to end this strife and for humanity to embrace once more the traditions that kept the peace with our animal kin.”-Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
(yellow elephant water bottle photo by Bill Allen)
“Peter Ngande, the cook and general assistant in the Amboseli elephant camp, once saw … an encounter between a solitary lion and a herd of elephants. While working in a fossil-digging project in another part of Kenya, Peter noticed the lion crouching and glancing from side to side as if frightened. A herd of elephants was approaching, and the landscape somehow trapped the lion so that he couldn’t get out of the elephant’s way. At the last moment the lion leaped forward, dug his claws into the shoulder of the lead elephant, a large female, and hung there. In a single motion the elephant reached her trunk over the lion’s body, grabbed him by the tail, ripped him off, and, using the tail as a handle, slammed him into the ground repeatedly until he was dead. The elephants then broke branches from some nearby bushes and covered the dead lion with them – a sort of burial – before they walked off.” – Silent Thunder, page 64