Featured Giveaway: G.A. Bradshaw's Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
By Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 05/21/2009
The well-being of animals matters, and not only because, as Jeremy Bentham said, “The question is not whether they can talk or reason, but whether they can suffer.” What’s more, we’re in this world together, and how animal life fares, so, eventually, fares humanity.
As G.A. Bradshaw explains in Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity (Yale University Press, Booth 2627), we have a lot to learn from our four-footed friends. Currently, through culling, warfare, and habitat loss, the elephant population is down to a few hundred thousand (from millions), and elephants are truly traumatized; they’ve lost their longstanding culture, and youngsters have few older elephants from which to learn. In fact, humans have intervened, rehabilitating zoo and circus elephants and treating distressed elephants as they would human trauma victims. And there’s the lesson for us: destroy our bonds, our accumulated knowledge and togetherness, and we destroy ourselves. We’ll turn rogue like the elephants who have lost friends and family and are dazed and aggressive. Let’s heal together; but first, read Bradshaw’s book. Click here for our complete BEA galley giveaway guide.
