Book meme

From Nicole’s blog, passed on from other blogs…

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
5. Donât you dare dig for that âcoolâ? or âintellectualâ? book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (author Matthew Scully; this is a library book and I’m actually just two pages behind this passage!)


“Forget Trade Bans,” the magazine urges in a familiar refrain.Â  “Just Make Animals Pay Their Own Way.”

They are talking about a species of intelligent mammal whose population across Asia and Africa stands at 5 percent of what it was a century ago; whose numbers were halved in a generation; who suffered casualties of more than 700,000 just in Africa during the 1980s, facing Nitro Expresses on one side and, on the other, swarms of paramilitary poaching gangs armed with AK-47s, radios, and spotter planes.Â  In Africa there is hardly such thing anymore as a middle-aged wild elephant with fully grown tusks, which for illegal poachers still at work has meant twice the killing for the same amount of ivory.

This chapter is about U.S. hunting safaris and the “conservation” of elephants: rich Americans pay local Africans to “protect” the elephants from poachers so they can take their paying American hunting customers there to kill them as trophies.

2 thoughts on “Book meme

  1. Great. So I’m the only book meme member with a crappy book. I realized there were two other books that were much more highbrow and closer at hand…but alas, too late.

  2. I’m not usually reading so I only had one to choose! I actually tried to grab the CFR at my desk yesterday but there weren’t 123 pages in it…

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