“The back of an elephant is the best way to get close to tigers, rhinoceros, and other animals.” © Joan Myers

 

The images in Joan Myers’s new book, The Jungle at the Door, were inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s jungle stories, which the photographer read as a child. However, the magnificent animals featured in the book are threatened with extinction, hunted by poachers eager for their skins, teeth and claws. And their habitat is shrinking in the face of increasing development. Myers says, “Seeing a tiger in the wild is a rare and special gift.  I fear that, with their numbers steadily decreasing, it is unlikely that my grandchildren will have the opportunity I had to see a tiger in Kipling’s forest. And as we lose these wild animals and wild places, we lose a primitive and mysterious wildness that has long been part of our human psyche.”

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