The Social Behavior of Older Animals
by Anne Innis Dagg
Johns Hopkins University Press, 225 pp., $35.00
Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
by G.A. Bradshaw
Yale University Press, 310 pp., $28.00
Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson
Mariner, 340 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Harper, 239 pp., $24.99
The last common ancestor of elephants and humans lived over 100 million years ago. Yet undeniably we share much in common, perhaps because some of our ancestors were shaped at the same evolutionary forge—the productive, crowded, and intensely competitive world of the African Savannah. It’s this world, in part, that endowed both humans and elephants with exceptional intelligence, and a dependence on complex societies for their well-being.
