Douglas-Hamilton and I Afterwards, hypothesized about wha had triggered the attack. It was possible that we surprised her. Perhaps it was her mother's instinct to defend her calves. It was also conceivable that she had recently been frightened by a lion and was in an agitated state. The more dithcult question, however, was why, at the last minute, did she decide not to kill him? I suppose we will never know, but I like to think that, after confusing him with an enemy, she finally recognized in Douglas Hamilton a genuine friend of elephants. lain Douglas Hamilton, Elephantologist"If you had asked me when I was ten years old what I wanted to do," Douglas-Hamilton says, "I'd have said: want to have an airplane; I want to fly around Africa and save the animals." Later, while studying zoology at Oxford University, he found his goals hadn't changed. "Science for me was a passport to the bush,'" he says, not the other way around I became a scientist so I could live a life in Africa and be in the bush." Early in his career in Africa, he went to Tanzania as a research volunteer in Lake Manyara National Park. He bought himself a small airplane, which he could use for track