What are you reading?
 

I've just started Swift and Enduring: Cheetahs and Wild Dogs of the Serengeti by George and Lory Frame. It's about their work studying those animals in 1976 and was published in 1981, so it's quite out of date, at least in respect to the presence of wild dogs in the Serengeti, but has wonderful observations about behavior and the nature of their work. It's interesting because they name quite a few of the animals they watch, and I had thought that such anthropomorphizing was still taboo back then, but maybe it makes it easier to identify or refer to animals when researchers are in the field. Perhaps PredatorBiologist can weigh in on that. I'll leave you with a description of puppy behavior that was identical to what I saw in my own dogs:

The "look what I've got" ploy involved prancing, headshaking and mock struggles with the object, or most efficacious of all, simply extending one end of the trophy to somebody's face, then pulling it away just before he could get hold of it.

Kmania: That sounds like a great book -- I checked Amazon for it but came up empty. Where did you find your copy? You are right that there has always been a large segment of scientists who frown on naming the animals other than 1A etc. From a straight research point of view that makes sense but if you want to engage readers and people to fund research and conservation it sure helps to give personality type names. There are great examples of doing it both ways, the only think I don't like is watching a film where the animals have been named and are consequently treated like pets with the researcher establishing real contact and influence on the animal as opposed to just observation.

As for what I'm reading, I hope to have a great choice to make next week if Santa thinks I've been good enough. Will be choosing between:

The Old Way: A Story of the First People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas all about the bushmen and their way of life.

The Man-Eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park by Robert Frump

The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears by Doug Peacock, Andrea Peacock

Doug Peacock is one of my favorite authors, a real legend of the American West who the main character in Ed Abbey's classic The Monkey Wrench Gang was based on.

I'm pretty excited to do some good reading in the New Year.

PB

Abebooks.com has a number of copies
starting fron $6.48 used

aby
Disclaimer: i do not own AbeBooks
... unfortunately ...
It is really frustrating for me to pay much more on postage than for the actual book... so many good $1.00 books there...(in the last week i've ordered 16 books for the price of xxx)
being american has some advantages too

Thanks Aby -- I have it on the way.

Hi PB,

I've had it for years; as the former editor of a dog magazine, I have a number of books like this in my library that I don't get around to reading until I have some incentive--like an upcoming safari!

As I read further, I found the answer to my question. The Frames write:

"Each cub already had a reference number in our files, but names would be easier to remember when I began recording their behavior in detail."

Doug Peacock is a wonderful writer. I read a lot of his stuff a few years ago when I was on a grizzly jag. I'm going to look for the other books you mentioned too.

Happy reading!

Kim

Ecological Intelligence by Ian McCallum

Interesting list of people's current reads--thanks for sharing, all of you. I'm definitely going to check out these titles.

I'm plodding my way through "The Fate of Africa" by Martin Meredith. I've become even more interested in the modern history of Africa since my trip last year.

This is an interesting, huge book. I had to put it down for a while after reading the chapters detailing the Rwandan genocide and the resulting war in the DRC. Quite possibly the most depressing 2 chapters of literature I've ever read.

After I'm done, I'm going back to animal/nature-based books for a while.