More Elephants
Jun. 11th, 2012 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMore elephants! I’ve got kind of an elephant thing going here. Most recently I’ve been reading Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, which is good but frustrating.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of interesting information here - elephants can coordinate their movements with other elephant groups from over four miles away, for instance, communicating through sounds too low for humans to hear. (Humans can feel the sounds, though, like the deep reverberations of a church organ.) And much that’s horrifying: when hunters cull elephant herds, they always take care to kill all the elephants they find in one place. Out of kindness. So the elephants left behind aren’t traumatized.
I suppose from a certain point of view that is kind. Which makes it horrifying.
What I find frustrating - and I realize this is as much a result of my own rationalist biases as anything else - is that the book is sprinkled with dreams and general mysticism. A lot of animal writing has this streak of mysticism, which is one thing in a memoir about a pet cockatiel or whatever. But this memoir is supposed to be more or less scientific, so what are the dreams doing there?
Especially given that Payne doesn’t seem to take them entirely seriously. One of the earliest dreams, just after Payne realizes that elephants communicate through infrasound, features the elephants telling her that they didn’t tell her about their secret communication method so she could tell just anybody.
And then Payne...proceeds to tell everybody about the elephants’ secret communication method, and never refers to the dream again. No sense of guilt for breaking faith with the dream elephants? Why even bring the dream up if she didn’t think it mattered? Her forward suggests that she included these dreams out of a desire for completeness, but the book would have been stronger without them. Good books are created as much by leaving things out as by putting things in.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of interesting information here - elephants can coordinate their movements with other elephant groups from over four miles away, for instance, communicating through sounds too low for humans to hear. (Humans can feel the sounds, though, like the deep reverberations of a church organ.) And much that’s horrifying: when hunters cull elephant herds, they always take care to kill all the elephants they find in one place. Out of kindness. So the elephants left behind aren’t traumatized.
I suppose from a certain point of view that is kind. Which makes it horrifying.
What I find frustrating - and I realize this is as much a result of my own rationalist biases as anything else - is that the book is sprinkled with dreams and general mysticism. A lot of animal writing has this streak of mysticism, which is one thing in a memoir about a pet cockatiel or whatever. But this memoir is supposed to be more or less scientific, so what are the dreams doing there?
Especially given that Payne doesn’t seem to take them entirely seriously. One of the earliest dreams, just after Payne realizes that elephants communicate through infrasound, features the elephants telling her that they didn’t tell her about their secret communication method so she could tell just anybody.
And then Payne...proceeds to tell everybody about the elephants’ secret communication method, and never refers to the dream again. No sense of guilt for breaking faith with the dream elephants? Why even bring the dream up if she didn’t think it mattered? Her forward suggests that she included these dreams out of a desire for completeness, but the book would have been stronger without them. Good books are created as much by leaving things out as by putting things in.
