When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

[fruhmenschen]

Here is my book of the hunting season selection
When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

http://www.ethicsweb.ca/books/animal.htm

[Wombaticus Rex]

Awesome! Will cop.

Highly recommend Narby's "Intelligence in Nature," too. Gorgeous writing, short and powerful

[Simulist]

I also agree that this is awesome. With one exception.

The use of the term, "animal," to describe beings other than human (we humans are, after all, "animals") is a trick of language providing the distance between "us" and "them" that helps the exploitation of these others to continue.

More preferable to me would be a title that at least tried to encompass this idea (especially since the actual title might be all the greater number of people will ever see). Perhaps "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Non-Humans" or, perhaps for greater reading-elegance, "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals*" (with at least an asterisk -- as was done in that awful, and awfully-successful, book about Sex*).

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals*

*Other than the Human Ones

[temp-monitor]

One of the most shocking films I have ever seen: Shocking to witness a Mongolian music ritual to entice a camel mother to accept her own rejected offspring, in which the camel is moved by the music to weep. Witnessing a camel's response to music in tears makes one reevaluate animals.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-stor ... ing-camel/

A nomadic family in Mongolia’s Gobi desert faces a problem when a white camel colt is born in a difficult delivery and the mother rejects it. Repeated efforts by the extended family to get the mother to nurse the colt fail. The colt stands alone and cries for its mother. The family worries that the colt will not survive. Finally, Dude (Enkhbulgan Ikhbayar), the older boy, is sent to a nearby town to find a musician who can perform a “Hoos” ceremony.

Little Ugna (Uuganbaatar Ikhbayar) begs to go along. The two boys travel for miles across the desert, stopping at a neighbor’s yert, where Ugna is delighted by his first encounter with television. They travel on to the village, and then return home with word that a musician is on the way. A musical ceremony is performed in an effort to get the mother camel to accept her colt.

The Story of the Weeping Camel is a blend of documentary footage and narrative. Filmmakers Luigi Falorni and Byambasuren Davaa cast a real nomad family of herders and shot many of the events in the film as they occurred. The Story of the Weeping Camel was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the 2004 edition of New Directors/New Films.