Book Specs 📖

• Author: Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence
• Genre: Non-fiction Memoir; Nature/conservation
• Pages: 368 pages (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Ordinary man develops extraordinary bond with herd of wild elephants on his Thula Thula Game Reserve in Zululand.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• This made me nostaligic of my volunteer trip to Johannesburg a couple of years ago!Thank you Steph for recommending this book, I miss you dearly and understand why you cried when reading this (I thought you were overreacting but I totally get it now!!) I’m reminded how much we have to learn from our animal family.
• Reading about animals like elephants, warthogs, hyenas that I’ve seen in real life deepened my compassion for them. Although we can develop empathy vicariously through books and stories, it made me realize how important it is to get into the world and see things with your own eyes. Truthfully if I read this book without having gone to Johannesburg, if I had not walked with the elephants and felt their leathery skin with my own hands, I can’t say I would’ve felt as deeply connected. New insigh: empathy/compassion comes from experience immersion!
• On animal instincts and trusting our gut. As humans, the further we are removed from the wild, the less sensitive we are to our primal instincts and our ability to react to danger. It’s a big loss to our humanity and explains why unhappiness in North America hasn’t correlated with the technological improvements in society.Nature has a way of healing this lack and connecting ourselves with our base emotions/instincts.
• Favourite elephant fact: Elephants transmit infrasound vibrations through stomach rumblings to send messages, long-distance, from herd to herd.
  • Also: “There is a link between congenital intelligence and long distance communication”. Wow!! This is a testament to all the LDR out there!

“Quotes”🗣

“…the essence of communicating with any animal…is not so much the reach as the acknowledgement…If you are not signalling to them that their communication has arrived with you then there can be no communication. “

“Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon.

“We were alive due to a gut instinct. nothing more, nothing less. “

“But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.”