A Mammoth Discovery

Earlier this month on a bike ride downtown, I turned a corner and saw …

elephants in a parking lot.

Yes, really. Elephants, who were bordered on one side by tents of white horses and on the other, cages of white tigers. How many endangered animals can you get in one parking lot?

Only Barnum & Bailey knows for sure. Yup, turns out the circus was in town.

It was heartbreaking to see these creatures on a barren lot of pavement. After watching one elephant do nothing but repeatedly rock back and forth in place, I couldn’t look anymore. I fantasized about breaking them out of there, but even my imagination was a little lean on ideas for disguising and hiding them.

Yesterday was Elephant Appreciation Day. (Remember how I said this month was full of wacky holidays?) I meant to post this yesterday, but … well … whatever. Here’s my contribution to the special day: a list of books about elephants. The least we can do for them is understand their lives so that we may better share the planet with them.

If you have a friend or relative who’s crazy for big-eared pachyderms, snag one of these books as a gift. If you’re just trying to figure out why your friend or relative is crazy for elephants, read one yourself!

Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir
by Joyce Poole

Elephant
by Steve Bloom
 
Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family
by Cynthia Moss

Elephant Reflections
by Dale Peterson and Karl Ammann

Elephant Song
by Barry B. Longyear

Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant
by Lyall Watson

Elephants (Living Wild)
by Melissa Gish

Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
by G. A. Bradshaw

Everything Elephants: A Collector’s Pictorial Encyclopedia
by Michael Knapik

Eyewitness: Elephant
by Ian Redmond

Face to Face with Elephants (Face to Face with Animals)
by Dereck Joubert and Beverly Joubert

From Elephants to Mice: Animals Who Have Touched My Soul
by James Mahoney

Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants
by John Frederick Walker

Jumbo: This Being the True Story of the Greatest Elephant in the World
by Paul Chambers

Just for Elephants
by Carol Buckley

Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story
by Daphne Jenkins Sheldrick

Secrets of the Savanna: Twenty-three Years in the African Wilderness Unraveling the Mysteries of Elephants and People
by Mark James Owens and Cordelia Dykes Owens

Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants
by Katharine Payne

Tarra & Bella: The Elephant and Dog Who Became Best Friends
by Carol Buckley

The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal
by Cynthia J. Moss, Harvey Croze and Phyllis C. Lee

The Cowboy and His Elephant: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship
by Malcolm MacPherson

The Elephant Whisperer: Learning about Life, Loyalty and Freedom from a Remarkable Herd of Elephants
by Lawrence Anthony

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild
by Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence

The Elephant’s Secret Sense: The Hidden Life of the Wild Herds of Africa
by Caitlin O’Connell

The Elephants and I: Pursuing a Dream in Troubled Zimbabwe
by Sharon Pincott

The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness
by Mark James Owens and Cordelia Dykes Owens

To the Elephant Graveyard
by Tarquin Hall

Travels on My Elephant
by Mark Shand

Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant
by Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson

When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand
by Komar & Melamid and David Eggers

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy
 

Note: This list of nonfiction and memoir is by no means comprehensive. I deliberately excluded books about hunting elephants, of course (you wouldn’t believe how many there are), and I did not attempt to list children’s books on this subject because, as you may already know, there are LOADS of them.

[Photo by Nick Brandt.]

How Are We Today?

You don’t have to “believe” in climate change to realize our world is in peril. Consider this stat published in National Geographic last month:

Fifty years ago, 450,000 lions roamed the Earth. Today, their number has dwindled to 20,000.

I dare anyone to do the math and deny the tragic story behind the equation.

Acoustic biologist Katy Payne recounts in Silent Thunder her encounter one night with a low-hanging branch, which left her with a superficial but bloody head wound. The African scouts she was with began moaning—and didn’t stop moaning until they saw the next morning that she would be fine. The Shona people Payne worked with had a strong sense of bonding—of “we.” If one person hurts, everyone hurts. “If you are well, then I am well, too,” they would say.

To be stewards of our planet, we would be wise to take this Shona perspective one step further and include all elements of all ecosystems into our bonded circle. “I am well if the Himalayan black bear is well, too.”

However, as I wrote in “Closing the Book on Salt,” the Himalayan black bear is far from being well. It’s being poached for common salt, among other things.

This one problem seems easy to address in my mind. Companies usually engage in philanthropic endeavors, and one of the big salt companies could make Myanmar poaching AND mountain tribes its charitable effort: Donate iodized salt to the tribes. The people stay healthy, the animals get to live, and the big salt company balances out its destruction-by-mining business (sort of).

Of course, halting the demise of the lion populations—or of any other creature or organism in areas shared with humans—is not so easy. Solutions must be good for both wildlife AND people. As Payne writes:

“[T]he community that includes us all is larger than any of us knows, and its health reflects the quality of the relations between all of its parts. I am well if you are well. I am well only if you are well, too.”

When I saw that NG stat about lions, I thought of Rachel Carson—the pioneer ecologist who first warned the world of the dangers of pesticide use—who once said:

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”

[Pics of lions and elephants from the African Wildlife Foundation.]