Quotes from Lawrence Anthony

It is about the elephants - it was they who whispered to me and taught me how to listen.

the biggest damage to the Baghdad Zoo had not been done in battle, fierce as it had been. It was the looters. They had killed or kidnapped anything edible and ransacked everything else. Even the lamp poles had been unbolted, tipped over, and their copper wiring wrenched out like multicolored spaghetti. As we drove past, we could see groups of looters still at it, scavenging like colonies of manic ants.

If there is one thing I disapprove of it's the unnatural capture and taming of wild animals, whether an elephant or a bird. To me, the only good cage is an empty cage.

But even if those wavelengths only vibrate for hundreds of square miles, which is now generally accepted in the scientific community, it still means elephants are potentially in contact with each other across the African continent. One herd speaks with a neighbouring herd, which in turn connects with another until you have conduits covering their entire habitat, just as you or I would have a long-distance telephone call.

the trip itself may have so far gone smoothly,

How such incredibly powerful creatures could be so vulnerable was a crime against the universe. The tragic futility of it all was what really got me. The rhino's brilliant million-year evolutionary effort to build up three tons of muscle, bone and horn to defend itself meant nothing in a modern technological world that didn't care a fig about them. The fact that our grandchildren may never see a rhino in the wild again was a pivotal reason to continue to try and save them.

But yet, but yet . . . the night he died, they [the elephants] were right there outside his house. And they came every evening for the next week as the sun set, until his ashes were scattered on the land he loved. Then they left.

Under Saddam's ruthless regime, where human rights barely nudged the moral barometer, animals didn't rate at all.

Wildlife can absorb adversity that would destroy a human without a blink.

Life and death go hand in glove.

They say you get out of life what you put in, but that is only true if you can understand what it is that you are getting.

Malooh, the Bengal tiger,

Was it always other creatures that had to pay for man's follies with their lives?

And there we were in the Croc Pools: a herd of elephants, two crocodiles, a dog, and a sweaty group of men united by the most basic instinct of all—

The Baghdad Zoo experience certainly altered my perception of my own species and inexorably pushed me to explore in more depth mankind's near-suicidal relationship with the plant and animal kingdoms. The most crucial lesson I learned in Baghdad was this: If "civilized" man is capable of routinely justifying such blatant abuse of trapped wildlife, what of the other unseen atrocities being inflicted on our planet?

most large-fish species, including cod, marlin, swordfish, and tuna, are critically endangered, and huge dead zones are appearing in our oceans, silent places devoid of life. It

That night after returning from the meeting I got further bad news. David told me he was resigning to go to England. He had met an attractive young British guest at the lodge, whom I noticed had kept extending her stay.

owned zoo in an occupied country. Military

But sometimes you have to go for it in life. If you just sit around thinking, then nothing ever happens. And with that I was seized by a moment of clarity.

When one registers the fact that our very own survival depends upon the wellbeing of all life on our planet, one starts to understand that we are the ones responsible for the state we find Earth in today.

was for a fleeting instant the pachyderm Pied Piper.

We might be mad or stupid, but at least we were serious.

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba'athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

It is a terrible indictment against the human race that it's possible for such places of brutality to exist.