Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss

I've felt an increasing desire to learn more about elephants recently. I'm not sure what started it, but come on...they are so seriously cool. They have awesome bendy trunks that can pluck a flower or knock over a lion! And you hear allusions to how intelligent and sensitive and social they are. Plus I just love any huge animal. After searching around a bit online, I came across this book. Cynthia Moss spent 13 years in Amboseli National Park at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro studying the elephants that lived there. The research that has been carried out there, by her and others, seems to provide us with the most comprehensive body of knowledge that we have about how elephants function over an (at least sort of) long period of time in a relatively undisturbed natural habitat. There are so few left. And to truly understand population dynamics, social structure, and how the elephants and their environment respond to each other, takes a long time. Elephants can live over 60 years and they do develop somewhat intricate relationships, which can be wildly thrown off by the poaching of important matriarchs, droughts, shrinking habitats and other events. I have heard references to the culling of elephants before, which is done in certain areas in the thinking that it will preserve the vegetation from being completely decimated and ultimately be better for the environment. I was interested to read that it is likely a much more complicated web than we realize and that human tampering is almost always worse in the end than just letting nature do its thing. Elephant families consist of females, usually of several generations, and their calves, the males of which go off on their own by age 15 and roam more independently or join up with other males at times. Certain family groups have friendly bonds with others and choose to spend much of their time together. When times are good and there is no drought, they are fun and frisky. It was touching to learn that in many instances where they had to confront or chase away some aggressor or other and could easily have killed them, they took deliberate care not to. They seem like such wise and sensitive animals. As usual, humans are botching things badly and it will take quite a bit of action to prevent them from going completely extinct. The ivory trade is still the number one threat to their existence. Reading this definitely makes me want to see what I can do to support their conservation.