Books Old & New: The Elephant Whisperer

I am occasionally asked (or just tell people if I’m not) which is my favourite book about wildlife.  It is hands down, without any shadow of a doubt The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony.  I wrote this about it in Animal Trust: “Shortly after Lawrence Anthony’s sudden death from a heart attack, two separate groups of wild elephants he had known, who it is safe to assume had not heard the news on the radio or read it in a newspaper, travelled for miles from different parts of the park, came to the house (itself an unusual event, although they had sometimes ventured so close when they had a new calf to proudly show off), stood vigil, and mourned, for two days. They returned again exactly one year later.”

I was also kindly given permission to quote this short extract on the subject of hunting for sport: “I have never had a problem with hunting for the pot. Every living thing on this planet hunts for sustenance one way or another, from the mighty microbe upwards. Survival of the fittest is, like it or not, the way of this world. But hunting for pleasure, killing only for the thrill of it, is to me an anathema. I have met plenty of trophy hunters. They are, of course, all naturalists; they all know and love the bush; and they all justify their action in conservation speak, peppered with all the right buzz words. The truth is, though, that they harbour a hidden impulse to kill, which can only be satisfied by the violent death of another life form by their hand. And they will go to inordinate lengths to satisfy, and above all justify, this apparently irresistible urge. Besides, adding to the absurdity of their claims, there is not an animal alive that is even vaguely a match for today’s weaponry. The modern high-powered hunting rifle with telescopic sights puts paid to any argument about sportsmanship.”  Excerpt from The Elephant Whisperer, pages 174-175, by kind permission: from The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild © 2009 by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence. Reprinted by permission from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

I have just been flicking through the book and reading paragraphs again at random.  Every single one brings happy tears to my eyes. 

I also hugely enjoyed his widow, Françoise Malby-Anthony and Katja Willemsen’s book, An Elephant in My Kitchen, Sidgwick & Jackson, 2018.