The Great Oklahoma Elephant Hunt

It's 1975. Two baby circus elephants escape into the wilds outside the town of Hugo, in south-eastern Oklahoma. A young sheriff, Hal Powers, leads a posse of volunteers to find them. Two weeks pass without success. Four wannabe cowboys up from Texas join the posse. The New York Times gets wind of the chase and sends a reporter to cover it. A local school teacher, Gail Stewart, who has long had her eyes on the handsome young sheriff, gets involved in the search, but her little brother and his buddy, plus sundry other local characters, manage to greatly complicate her efforts to attract his attention. The Great Oklahoma Elephant Hunt offers fun, humor, romance, and a dash of local history to an actual event that forms the background for this fictional story.

Being an Account of Three Years' Ivory-Hunting Under Mount Kenia and Among the Ndorobo Savages of the Lorogi Mountains. Including a Trip to the North of Lake Rudolph

"For ten years I have been elephant hunting without intermission. During these ten years, I have shot 447 bull elephants, thereby creating a world''s record." - James Sutherland, 1912 As noted by professional African big-game hunter James Sutherland in his 1912 book "The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter," there are so many risks, as well as privations, incidental to the life of an elephant hunter, that he has only to keep at the game long enough to meet with an untimely end, and that, as a rule, a violent one. Even should he survive the many dangers attendant on the calling, in the long run, he generally undermines his constitution and lives on a mere wreck of his former self. Still, while the life lasts, it is one of the most glorious and exhilarating on earth, for again and again the chase resolves itself into an exciting duel ''twixt man and beast,'' and though the chances, even in dense jungle, are in favour of the man, occasions frequently arise when the latter''s life trembles in the balance. The hunter knows absolutely that if his rifle or cunning fails him in the least, he is as good as dead, and it is on this simple understanding that he joyfully sets out. James Sutherland 1872-1932 was a Scottish born professional elephant hunter. "The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter" is a classic elephant-hunting tale regarded as one of the best elephant hunting titles ever written. He is widely considered to be among the most successful professional elephant ivory hunters of the early 20th century. Sutherland came to Africa from England with a questionable background and while looking for a livelihood fell into ivory hunting as a way to make a fortune. It is said he killed over a thousand elephants in his long spanning life as an elephant hunter. While hunting with natives he formed close relationships and affection for these bush people. The book reveals much about the Sutherland as a person as well as the sport. This great hunting classic has been in demand for over a hundred years! Describing an attackby an enraged elephant, Sutherland writes: "A vicious blow from his tusk sent me hurtling against my tracker, Simba, who was a few paces away from me on my right, and together we came heavily to earth. Ere I had time to scramble to my feet, the elephant had turned, and seizing me by my khaki shirt underneath the right shoulder, flung me high above him in the air..." Elephants are not the only dangerous wildlife in Africa, as Sutherland notes: "People living in the perfect safety of their homes in a civilized country have no conception of the insecurity that is felt by natives in their kraals in the interior of Africa. The cause of this feeling of insecurity is chiefly the man-eating lion, and no other animal of the forest inspires such terror into the black man''s heart.... In those villages, far in the heart of the pori, where the white man is never seen, not hundreds but thousands of natives are annually killed by these monsters." In ranking Africa''s big game, according to Sutherland, "all my experience tends to confirm me in the opinion that the pursuit of the elephant is, without doubt, the most dangerous. Second, and on a par, I would classify buffaloes and lions; third, leopards. In comparison with these, very little risk attaches to the hunting of the rhinoceros." Sutherland writes not only on his hunting experiences but also the domestic life of his native trackers, including one who was punished for wife abuse: "Feeling that Makabuli deserved it, I told them that they had better take the law into their own hands and mete out the punishment they thought most appropriate to the occasion. This they promptly did; about a dozen of them (and I may say that a native woman is no weakling) soundly thrashed him, and, as a native can suffer no greater humiliation than to be beaten by women, Makabuli, I think, thoroughly expiated his misdemeanour."

Originally published 1912. A detailed and exciting record of sixteen years spent hunting African elephants and other big game. During ten of these years the author shot 447 bull elephants - a world record. Many of the earliest hunting books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.

The volume contains summaries of facts, theories, and unsolved problems pertaining to the unexplained extinction of dozens of genera of mostly large terrestrial mammals, which occurred ca. 13,000 calendar years ago in North America and about 1,000 years later in South America. Another equally mysterious wave of extinctions affected large Caribbean islands around 5,000 years ago. The coupling of these extinctions with the earliest appearance of human beings has led to the suggestion that foraging humans are to blame, although major climatic shifts were also taking place in the Americas during some of the extinctions. The last published volume with similar (but not identical) themes -- Extinctions in Near Time -- appeared in 1999; since then a great deal of innovative, exciting new research has been done but has not yet been compiled and summarized. Different chapters in this volume provide in-depth resumés of the chronology of the extinctions in North and South America, the possible insights into animal ecology provided by studies of stable isotopes and anatomical/physiological characteristics such as growth increments in mammoth and mastodont tusks, the clues from taphonomic research about large-mammal biology, the applications of dating methods to the extinctions debate, and archeological controversies concerning human hunting of large mammals.