How to detect an agenda biased brain, so as to "take it with a grain of salt", and not actual scientific fact.

I recently read the above work of fiction, and if you have never read it you need to. Not because it is any great literary work, but because it will arm you with the knowledge to not be taken in by any of the animal rights bu** sh*t.

Review from Publishers Weekly:

This thoughtful book by animal trauma specialist Bradshaw draws analogies between human and animal culture to illustrate the profound “breakdown” occurring in elephant societies. Extraordinarily sensitive and social, elephants' survival has long depended on their matriarchal lineage—now sundered by culling the herds, which disrupts the hierarchy—and their psyches have been broken by prolonged isolation and separation, painful hooks used as training tools and general cruelty. Captured elephants meet the criteria of the psychiatirc handbook DSM for suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on research on animal trauma, concentration camp survivors and Konrad Lorenz–type ethology, Bradshaw makes a multidisciplinary condemnation of elephant abuse and celebrates those working on rehabilitating and healing the animals—including an elephant massage therapist and the owners of an elephant sanctuary in the Tennessee hills. In the end, anthropomorphizing isn't the issue; Bradshaw says that instead of giving animals human feelings, we should observe that they have feelings that correlate with what we may feel in similar circumstances. With its heartbreaking findings and irrefutable conclusions, this book bears careful reading and consideration.

Review from Yale University Press:

Drawing on accounts from India to Africa and California to Tennessee, and on research in neuroscience, psychology, and animal behavior, G. A. Bradshaw explores the minds, emotions, and lives of elephants. Wars, starvation, mass culls, poaching, and habitat loss have reduced elephant numbers from more than ten million to a few hundred thousand, leaving orphans bereft of the elders who would normally mentor them.

As a consequence, traumatized elephants have become aggressive against people, other animals, and even one another; their behavior is comparable to that of humans who have experienced genocide, other types of violence, and social collapse. By exploring the elephant mind and experience in the wild and in captivity, Bradshaw bears witness to the breakdown of ancient elephant cultures.

All is not lost. People are working to save elephants by rescuing orphaned infants and rehabilitating adult zoo and circus elephants, using the same principles psychologists apply in treating humans who have survived trauma. Bradshaw urges us to support these and other models of elephant recovery and to solve pressing social and environmental crises affecting all animals, human or not.

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Here's where I have a problem understanding what this Aesop Fable author is talking about, and it is probably because I am "degree deficient", and thus accepting of being talked down to. In the above review, it states: In the end, anthropomorphizing isn't the issue; Bradshaw says that instead of giving animals human feelings, we should observe that they have feelings that correlate with what we may feel in similar circumstances. And from publisher Yale University Press this: People are working to save elephants by rescuing orphaned infants and rehabilitating adult zoo and circus elephants, using the same principles psychologists apply in treating humans who have survived trauma. Bradshaw urges us to support these and other models of elephant recovery and to solve pressing social and environmental crises affecting all animals, human or not.

Either I am totally ignorant, or the statements above are the "tell" or, the hint about what the agenda of the book is, science be damned. Paula Kuhumbu, who we will assume has a degree, is apparently having as hard of a time understanding how the author wants us to interpret "anthropomorphizing" , because she wrote this review for Conservation Biology: Bradshaw suggests we have completely underestimated elephants'' emotional capacities. . . . The evidence that human and elephant behaviors are similar is compelling. . . . This book is engrossing and will appeal to a general audience.

My understanding of the definition of anthropomorphizing, which the above reviews stress we must not do, is: 1. To endow with human qualities. 2. To attribute human characteristics to something that is non-human.

To make it even muddier and harder to understand, so that folks just take their word for it, to be done with it, here is the authors "bio". Before you think I have posted a picture below of Betty Davis, in her Oscar performance of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" I haven't. That is the author of the above book, Gay Bradshaw. Note her area of "expertize/specialization" in writing about captive animals is elderly individuals, (defined as people/humans) who have suffered capture and captivity. I point that out so you don't become confused like I am and start anthropomorphizing the animals, because the author and the reviewers stress that we must not.

Gay Bradshaw is founder and Executive Director of The Kerulos Center. Her founding of the field of trans-species psychology—the theory and practice animal psychological rehabilitation and conservation—began with the discovery of PTSD in wild elephant. She has written about this in her forthcoming book, Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity, (Yale University Press, 2009).

Her research has been featured in numerous media, including ABC 20/20, Stern, National Geographic, New York Times, Time, New Scientist, Nature, and the London Telegraph. Much of her research focuses on the effects of violence on and trauma recovery of parrots, elephants, and chimpanzees in captivity. Her area of specialization is elderly individuals who have suffered capture and captivity.