Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story Author: Daphne Sheldrick | Language: English | ISBN:
B0071VUQW8 | Format: PDF
Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story Description
Daphne Sheldrick, whose family arrived in Africa from Scotland in the 1820s, is the first person ever to have successfully hand-reared newborn elephants. Her deep empathy and understanding, her years of observing Kenya’s rich variety of wildlife, and her pioneering work in perfecting the right husbandry and milk formula have saved countless elephants, rhinos, and other baby animals from certain death.
In this heartwarming and poignant memoir, Daphne shares her amazing relationships with a host of orphans, including her first love, Bushy, a liquid-eyed antelope; Rickey-Tickey-Tavey, the little dwarf mongoose; Gregory Peck, the busy buffalo weaver bird; Huppety, the mischievous zebra; and the majestic elephant Eleanor, with whom Daphne has shared more than forty years of great friendship.
But this is also a magical and heartbreaking human love story between Daphne and David Sheldrick, the famous Tsavo Park warden. It was their deep and passionate love, David’s extraordinary insight into all aspects of nature, and the tragedy of his early death that inspired Daphne’s vast array of achievements, most notably the founding of the world-renowned David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and the Orphans’ Nursery in Nairobi National Park, where Daphne continues to live and work to this day.
Encompassing not only David and Daphne’s tireless campaign for an end to poaching and for conserving Kenya’s wildlife, but also their ability to engage with the human side of animals and their rearing of the orphans expressly so they can return to the wild, Love, Life, and Elephants is alive with compassion and humor, providing a rare insight into the life of one of the world’s most remarkable women.
- File Size: 3820 KB
- Print Length: 368 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (May 8, 2012)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0071VUQW8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,624 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Animals > Wildlife - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Environment > Conservation - #10
in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Animals > Wildlife
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Animals > Wildlife - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Environment > Conservation - #10
in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Animals > Wildlife
There must be some reason that we love elephants so. The big, strange beasts are among the most popular exhibits at circuses and zoos, for instance. Their participation in such venues may not have done the elephants much good, and neither has the relentless poaching for their ivory. One person who has harnessed a love of elephants in order to benefit the animals themselves is Dame Daphne Sheldrick, a conservationist who has special expertise in raising orphaned elephants and reintegrating them into the wild. The poachers have made lots of orphans, and Sheldrick has had an enormous amount of work to do within Kenya's Tsavo East National Park to try to bring some sort of balance. Elephants naturally loom large within her biography _Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), but so do the humans she has worked with, and sometimes against, as well as rhinos, zebras, dikdiks, civet cats, ostriches, mongooses, and more. It is a delightful book, with plenty of funny and sad stories, and a charming reverence for fellow creatures. Sheldrick has had a unique and useful life, and her looking back on it for us is generous and instructive.
Sheldrick was born in Nairobi in 1934, and was brought up with animals, and was fascinated by them. Her family put her in charge of an orphaned baby bushbuck when she was four, and her life changed. She was to go on to care for many other animals, eventually meeting David Sheldrick, Tsavo's principle warden. He had superb knowledge about African wildlife, and he had the looks of a movie star, and she lost her heart to him. The two of them both got divorced from their then-spouses, married, had a daughter of their own, and worked incessantly for Tsavo's wild beauties.
Disclaimer: I have visited and given money to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and so should you. Daphne Sheldrick has made a major contribution to wildlife conservation and her work is to be applauded. Her memoir is a somewhat conventional "Out of Africa" story: hardy pioneers, gauzy sunsets, magnificent vistas, and lots of lots of stories about the animals who have come her way. She was obviously deeply in love with David, and yet he strangely remains a somewhat remote character. He is defined by his deeds, as he and other rangers carve out Kenya's wildlife parks and reserves and heroically try to stop the decimation of the wildlife caused by our insatiable demand for trinkets made from ivory and potions made from rhino horn.
It's hard to criticize a book for what it does NOT say, but, having worked for over ten years with another Kenyan conservationist, Wangari Maathai, I have a very different perspective on the history of Kenya that Dame Daphne covers. (If you haven't read Maathai's memoir, Unbowed, I would recommend it.) What struck me most noticeably in Dame Daphne's story was the almost complete absence of black Kenyans. Nearly all of the main characters are white and of British stock. The Mau Mau rebellion is treated as an affront against white settlers. Daphne's daughter studies in South Africa, and some of her relatives retire there to live, but there is only one reference to Apartheid. We get no sense of the conservation movement in the context of Kenya as an independent country. We do not hear from black Kenyan political figures or the press or, indeed, from the poachers. We never learn the biographies of the black attendants who look after and even live with the animals.
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