Elephants on the Edge What Animals Teach Us about Humanity

Winner of ForeWord's Gold Medal for the 2009 Book of the Year Award in Psychology
2010 Green Book Festival Awards in the Animals Honorable Mention
A Scientific American's Favorite Science Books of 2009
2009 PROSE Award in the Psychology Honorable Mention

“Gay Bradshaw clearly demonstrates in this fascinating book, which is a groundbreaking and remarkable feat of scholarship, that we cannot understand the tenuous relationship between man and elephant (or any other co-inhabitants of the natural world) without a self-reflective insight into the deeper psychological and ethical substrata of our own minds.” —Allan N. Schore, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine University of California at Los Angeles

“Revolutionary and very exciting, this book is important both in terms of elephant biology and elephant welfare.” —Cynthia Moss, Amboseli Trust for Elephants

"African peoples and wildlife have been bound together in a delicate network of interdependence since ancient times. The arrival of colonialism tore apart these bonds:  human brother now fights against elephant brother, and mothers of both species mourn. Elephants on the Edge is an urgent call to end this strife and for humanity to embrace once more the traditions that kept the peace with our animal kin." —Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

“Elephants on the Edge is very thoroughly researched and beautifully presented—a devastating, scientific chronicle of the ignorance, cruelty, and mismanagement that placed these magnificent creatures in their present dire situation. Among Bradshaw’s many virtues is that she exposes the cowardice of scientists who are well aware of the damage now in progress but are unwilling to support animal rights or to condemn animal holocausts. We cannot possibly understand the world we live in unless we acknowledge the role we play in its destruction. Should we continue our Nazi-like behavior toward elephants, and indeed, toward any living creatures? Those who read this book won’t want to.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs and The Old Way: A Story of the First People

"Bradshaw brings home to us forcefully what we should have realized long ago:  that destroying the family life of highly social, intelligent animals leads inevitably to misery among individual survivors and pathological misbehaviour among the group." —J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2003