The intelligence of these elephants stunned me. Lawrence’s mission was to keep them contained while he convinced them that they were safe on Thula-Thula and could make a permanent home there. Breakout artists, they had a knack for escaping from game reserves and endangering local towns. The 7 elephants were angry they had seen their matriarch and her young daughter shot and killed, and expected the worst from humans. Living and working in South Africa in the mid-1990s, he bought Thula-Thula, a 5,000-acre game reserve to which he added a herd of rogue elephants that would have otherwise been put down. Lawrence Anthony was a conservationist renowned for his work rescuing animals at the Baghdad Zoo at the height of the US-led Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003. But this non-fiction gem, The Elephant Whisperer, grabbed me at the start and hasn’t let go.
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