Elephant Days and Nights: Ten Years with the Indian Elephant Tapa dura - 1994

The elephant has enjoyed a unique relationship with the people of India. It is a keystone biological species in tropical forests across Asia and over the past four thousand years has dominated the cultural, social and economic life of people as has no other creature. Yet elephants and people have also been in conflict; a conflict which now calls for urgent solutions. The author has been studying the life of wild elephants in southern India since 1980. This is the story of his work on elephants, of their ecology, social behaviour, interactions with people and the problems they currently face. His account interweaves the biology of the elephant with observations of the animal in the field. The book opens by describing how the author became involved in this study before giving a chronological narrative, each chapter emphasizing a particular aspect of their life - reproduction, feeding habits, crop raiding and manslaughter, social organization and family life, seasonal cycles, and their slaughter at the hands of ivory poachers. Chapter 9 looks back four millennia to when elephants were probably first tamed in the Indus civilization and traces the fascinating story of how they became an inextricable part of the life of people in the Indian subcontinent, providing a new perspective of the origin of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, and of the interrelationship between culture and ecology. The author concludes by making recommendations for the effective management and conservation of this the most powerful of land mammals.