Book Description

Elephant Summer is a contemporary look at an age-old problem (Elephant Conservation) through the eyes of three best friends from GeorgeAnn, Texas. Taylor Jackson, Jackie Cooper and Smiley O'Dell visit an uncle in Kenya for the summer and become interested in the elephants in the Amboseli region, and intimately involved with one particular elephant family led by an old matriarch they call Sweety Pie. "We had left our small town of GeorgeAnn, Texas, to spend the summer with my Uncle Keeno in the jungles of Kenya. As an archeologist, it was his job to explore the region for clues of pre-historic man. For Jackie, Smiley, and me, it was just supposed to be a lot of fun. Now we were running for our lives, our legs pumping up and down like pistons, my heart pounding in my chest like cannon-fire." The three friends join two elephant researchers on their day to day sojourns into the bush and across the savannas to learn all they can about the elephants they are falling in love with...and their complicated and endless array of problems. Authors' Note: Culling has been a means of elephant population control in various areas of Africa for over fifty years. However, Kenya has recently stopped the practice of culling and currently prohibits culling as a means of elephant population management. Nevertheless, the act of culling as a manner of elephant population control is still practiced within other countries of the African continent. Hopefully, other countries in Africa will soon follow Kenya's lead and prohibit culling as a means of wildlife management, within their own boundaries as well.