Week 3

I read "Trumpets of Elephants" by Safina this week. In this chapter, she annotated how important water is to elephants. In Amboseli National Park, lots of elephants died due to the drought. But once the rain returned, Safina noted, "the surviving female elephants bereft of a babies all cycled into estrus at about the same time. Result: the biggest baby boom”(Safina 10). It underlines how important water is to elephants — the rain. With the rain, elephants grow. Without the rain, elephants die.

I am thinking about researching elephants and social behavior. I have always cared about elephants since high school. I always thought they are smart and kind. But humans are not kind to them. They beat elephants in the circus to amuse people. They force elephants to be their riding seats in Thailand. So I want to know if elephants could feel pain and sadness from their miserable life. From this topic, I also want to draw the public’s attention to the unknowing facts about elephants. For example, the activity of ride the elephants seems like a must-do when people travel in Thailand. But that is all under the business propaganda. Elephants couldn’t bear such weight on their back. So we must stop the harm.

In the website "save the elephants", the goal of both the founder and scientist Dr. Iain Douglas is to bind the diverse talents together to fight for the elephants' future. This is a great website to browse. It includes lots of elephant projects that we can look at.