"Physiologically, elephants are unique - entirely different from all other mammals. Yet, since antiquity, observers have agreed that the elephant is the animal most akin to man." "Today both species of elephant - Africans and Asians - stand on the brink of extinction. Hope is arising, however, from a new generation of young American scientists, many of them women. Female zoologists and biologists have led the field in new findings about elephant ecology, family and sexual patterns, and the animals' continual communication by ultrasound, inaudible to human ears." "The Astonishing Elephant also reveals, for the first time, a hair-raising story of elephant "genocide": in the years between the Civil War and World War I, all male elephants in U. S. circuses were stealthily killed - shot, poisoned, drowned, and even hanged. The reason was musth, a periodic condition of mature males that renders them uncontrollable. So, gradually, only female elephants - now with masculine names - were put on parade, with none the wiser." "Most important, The Astonishing Elephant details a decade of heartbreaking trial and error and eventual triumph as scientists have tried to learn how to breed elephants via artificial insemination."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved