The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild

by Lawrence Anthony

only self-imposed human limitations that impeded my understanding.

In our noisy cities we tend to forget the things our ancestors knew on a gut level: that the wilderness is alive, that its whispers are there for all to hear – and to respond to.

there is nothing like looking at what is actually going on around you, to turn a lot of what you always thought to be true on its head.

Here in this ancient woodland, the acacia tree not only understands it’s under attack when browsed by antelope or giraffe, it quickly injects tannin into its leaves making them taste bitter. The tree then releases a scent, a pheromone, into the air to warn other acacias in the area of the potential danger.

Under the microscope, living organisms are just a soup of chemicals and minerals. But what about what the microscope doesn’t see? That life force, the vital ingredient of existence – from an acacia to an elephant – can it be quantified?

It’s known they emit stomach rumblings at frequencies far below human hearing that can be detected even when they’re many miles apart.

elephants transmit infrasound vibrations through unique stomach rumblings that can be received over vast distances. These ultra-low frequencies, which cannot be detected by the human ear, oscillate at similar wavelengths to those transmitted by whales; vibrations that some believe quaver across the globe.

There is a concrete link between advanced congenital intelligence and long-distance communication. For example, a frog’s communication skills consist solely of primal mating croaks as its pond constitutes its entire universe. It has no need to expand further.

But elephants are communicating across vast distances, which shows that these giants of the wilderness are far more developed than we ever believed.

In the animal kingdom communication is a two-way flow, just as it is everywhere else. If you are not signalling to them that their communication has arrived with you then there can be no communication. It’s as simple as that.

Communication is not the preserve of humans; it is the one thing that is truly universal.

Previously traumatized wild elephants appeared to regain a degree of faith in new humans once the matriarch has established trust with just one new human. But it must be the matriarch.

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. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable.

intonation and intention can communicate far more than mere words.

They say you get out of life what you put in, but that is only true if you can understand what it is that you are getting.

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. I