From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000--

Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the Wild
Edited by Jeheskel Shoshani, Elephant Research Foundation
Checkmark Books (c/o Facts On File Inc., 11 Penn Plaza, NY 10001), 1992,
updated 2000. 240 pages, hardcover, illustrated. $39.95.

Foxes by David Macdonald
Frogs by David Badger, photos by John Netherton
Salmon by John M. Baxter
(Each 72 pages, paperback, illustrated. $16.95.)
Minke Whales by Rus Hoelzel & Jonathan Stern
(48 pages, paperback, illustrated. $12.95.)
All from WorldLife Library
(c/o Voyageur Press, 123 N. 2nd St., Stillwater, MN 55082), 2000.

There may be no more comprehensive or more thoroughly illustrated
anthology about elephants than the latest updated edition of Elephants:
Majestic Creatures of the Wild. Wild African elephants get the most
attention, but prehistoric elephants, the elephants of India and China,
and elephants in captivity are also discussed in depth and detail.
Among the better-known of 40 contributors gathered by editor
Jeheskel Shoshani are Save The Elephants founder Ian Douglas-Hamilton,
National Parks of South Africa director Anthony Hall-Martin, two-time
Kenya Wildlife Service director Richard Leakey, longtime World Wildlife
Fund representative Esmond Bradley Martin, Amboseli Elephant Research
Project director Cynthia Moss and her associate Joyce Poole, David
Sheldrick Wildlife Trust chair Daphne Sheldrick, and former Jacksonville
Zoo director Dale Tuttle.
Most make more than just a cameo appearance, and some clash over
elephant conservation strategies. In that regard, it is disappointing
that Sheldrick is limited to two pages about feeding and rehydrating
orphaned baby elephants. Although others echo her belief that elephants
should not be culled or hunted, against others who seem to favor the
lethal "sustainable use" advocated by WWF, Sheldrick gets no chance to
contradict claims that the deforestation and elephant dieback of 1970 at
Tsavo National Park in Kenya should have been prevented by killing
elephants.
As widow of David Sheldrick, the founding Tsavo warden, Daphne
Sheldrick argues from the perspective of having lived almost all her life
among wild elephants at first Tsavo and now Nairobi National Park that
diebacks of dry forest and elephants are part of a repetitive natural
cycle--as also occurred involving other great migrating herd animals from
Triceratops to bison.
Opponents of elephant training by zoos and circuses may be
disturbed to read that most--and perhaps all--of the elephants who have
bred successfully in captivity were ex-performers. Though elephant
training is often rough and the elephants are sometimes compelled to behave
in an unnatural manner, there is increasing recognition among people who
care about elephants that a captive elephant must be given mentally and
physically stimulating activities.
Much attention is given to musth, the violent and seemingly insane
condition of a bull elephant who is ready to mate. Under other
circumstances the same bull may behave like Chandrasekharan, a bull
personally known to Shoshani, who had been trained to plant logs upright
in pre-dug post holes. One day Chandrasekharan balked, holding a heavy
log in mid-air with his trunk until his trainer discovered and evicted a
dog who had fallen asleep at the cool bottom of a post hole.
Though children too may enjoy it, and though it would be a great
addition to library collections, Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the
Wild may be excluded from school and public libraries because of two photos
of elephants copulating.
The new Voyageur volumes on Foxes, Frogs, Minke Whales, and
Salmon are less comprehensive yet sound overviews, authored by individual
experts instead of a panel, and clearly designed to meet standard school
library specifications.
An unwritten spec for the school library market is that
controversial topics must be handled in an uncontroversial way.
Thus David MacDonald, better known as author of the
soon-to-be-updated Encyclopedia of Mammals, does not directly condemn
foxhunting in Foxes. Instead, he presents the arguments pro and con,
evaluates the science on either side, and thereby gently but completely
dismantles the pretext that foxhunting is effective predator control.
Frogs author David Badger does not inveigh against dissecting frogs
in classrooms; he does note the effect that frog-collecting for dissection
(and frogleg-eating) have on wild populations, points out the availability
of computerized alternatives to dissection, and goes on about introducing
frogs by species, in such a manner that one suspects few readers will ever
afterward want to kill any.
The content of Minke Whales would probably not even be in a volume
by itself if Japanese and Norway did not continue to kill minkes by the
hundred. It is far from an anti-whaling treatise, but Rus Hoelzel and
Jonathan Stern make the case that determining the status of whale
populations is still an inexact science, and that any attempt to set
whaling quotas will involve high-risk guessing.
Only Salmon, which certainly favors conservation, makes no
argument against any human exploitation of the topic species. Author John
M. Baxter accepts without question the mainstream view that salmon are of
interest because people eat them--and occasionally leaps out of scientific
objectivity with remarks such as, "There is an urgent need for a radical
approach to commercial fisheries management."
Whether commercial fishers will rally to try to toss Baxter out of
school libraries for allegedly advocating radicalism remains to be seen.
--M.C.