Elephants: The Deciding Decade

Victor Clulow is a zoology professor at Laurentian University.

This large and colorful book is dedicated to the African elephant,
“[a] truly wonderful and awe-inspiring animal,” as stated in the
preface. The title is borrowed from the 1989 Zoocheck (Toronto) meeting
of the same name, which raised $140,000 for the Kenya Wildlife Service.
The volume’s purpose is straightforward: to sensitize the reader to
the evils of the ivory trade, and to convey the delight elephants can
bring to observers and how tragic their loss would be to humankind.

A thoughtful and effective introduction by Richard Leakey sets the
scene—a cruel web of interacting economic, social, and ecological
forces extending over a vast area, where desertification, drought, wars,
and population pressures are constant preoccupations. The present decade
is seen as a decisive one for the elephant’s fate; its disappearance
as a species, the book makes clear, is inevitable unless real and
effective measures are taken and persisted with in the tumultuous social
and ecological arena that is its range.

Chapters of the book deal with the elephants and their relatives,
living and fossil, with elephant anatomy and physiology, and with
fascinating aspects of behavior and growth. Elephants in rain forests,
in caves (where they dig for salt), at the water’s edge, in the
desert, and, finally, in their leafy “graveyard” are among the
topics covered by a group of dedicated and highly competent and
enthusiastic researchers. Their scholarship and dedication are
buttressed and expanded by Brian Beck’s fine photographs of elephants
and other animals in their natural habitats. A useful reading list
appears at the back of the book.

Events since the book was published—including the deepening drought
and the strengthening of the ivory lobby during 1992—underline the
urgency of the case. Elephants: The Deciding Decade should be bought and
read, then bought again and given as a gift by those interested in
preserving the African elephant; royalties from the book go to the
International Wildlife Coalition. At $40, the price is right.