Elephant Memories By Cynthia Moss

Cynthia Moss, a former journalist and present director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, has studied the same population of elephants for 44 years. She has born in 1940 in Ossining, New York, U.S.A. In 1972, she started the famous Amboseli Elephant Research Project at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Since then she and her research associates have identified and recorded more than 1,400 elephants belonging to 50 families at an immense of 400 square miles.
For 14 years Cynthia Moss traced the histories of 25 elephants living in four related families at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Elephant Memories is about the park and the researchers who helped her there, but mainly it is about the complete history of Amboseli elephants.
Ms. Moss has been in Africa since 1968, and writing serves her larger goal - to enlist the reader's support in her passionate desire to preserve elephants. For, ultimately, this is what the book is about: the plight of the elephant in the 20th century. Kenya's population of some 15 million people (according to a 1979 census) will be double that by the year 2000. Inevitably elephants have come into conflict with land-hungry farmers and ranchers who do not welcome such destructive herbivores. Even within the boundaries of the parks, elephants fall victim to poisoning from human debris or fatal ensnarement in garbage pits generated from the immense (and immensely profitable) tourist trade. More gruesome still is the annual slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants shot by bands of heavily armed poachers who supply Japan and other countries with more than 800 tons of ivory each year. And finally, most dreaded of all by Ms. Moss because it will affect some of her closest friends, there is the possibility that park authorities will opt for culling - the systematic legal destruction of entire elephant families in order to save the naturally overgrazed Amboseli