'I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the animals that Fritz calls 'my people'. If gazelles could choose an advocate for themselves, they surely would select Fritz Walther. He knows those elegant animals better than anyone, and in this affectionate tribute he describes their behavior with charm, spirit, and insight' - George B. Schaller. When Fritz Walther was a young boy growing up in Dresden his grandfather took him to the zoo, where he immediately fell in love with gazelles and dreamed of going to Africa to study them. Now, almost thirty years after his field research, Walther gives us a memoir of his experiences - the challenges, problems, and romance of studying animals on the Serengeti at a time when it was still one of the great wild areas of the world. The first chapter gives us a detailed study of the mating behavior of Thomson's gazelles, focusing on the adventures of two exemplary tommy bucks, Short-Tail and Roman.The publisher defies any reader to escape from falling in love with these two animals and the man who is studying them. Other chapters recount Walther's experience with lions, the behavior of migratory herds, and the care of female antelopes for their young.
This is a major treatment of the nature of predator-prey relations, and a fascinating narrative on a day in the life of a small group of Oryx antelopes led across the plain by their leader, named Mzee, or 'the old guy'. 'Between trees and bushes glimmering in the sunlight, Roman disappeared from my sight - the tommy buck to whom I owed so much insight into animal life and so many brilliant personal experiences, and to whom I, too, had apparently been something more than an inevitable evil'.'There is much sparkling life and much bitter dying on the African plains. But death does not govern life in the wild, though it is permanently present somewhere in the background and may show up at any time. I deeply felt that it is precisely the occurrence of life in the presence of death that distinguishes the nature of freedom in the wild, and, before falling asleep in my sleeping bag in my car, I sometimes tried to imagine which horror might capture our politicians and social philosophers who babble so drolly about 'freedom' if they were exposed to this freedom - the only one which deserves the name'.
- ISBN10 025336325X
- ISBN13 9780253363251
- Publish Date 22 July 1995
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 March 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Indiana University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 176
- Language English