Among the Elephants

In this book Oria and I have tried to convey the sense of exploration, the excitements and the rewards of our venture into the world of elephants. In 1965 I was invited, as an inexperienced zoologist fresh from university, to study the elephants of Lake Manyara, for they were believed to present an urgent problem there. A study of their ecology soon compelled me to immerse myself in details of their social behavior, about which very little was known at that time. But when I came to ponder the keys to their survival, the field widened, and I realized that elephant ecology and survival can only be considered in relation to what men believe and how they believe.