Compassionate Book Talk: Forget the Camel with Elizabeth MeLampy

Compassionate Book Talk: "Forget the Camel"
with Elizabeth MeLampy
🐪🐍🦞
June 10th 2025

Today's episode, Rev. Sarah Bowen interviews Elizabeth MeLampy about her captivating and deeply insightful debut book, Forget the Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say about Being Human.

This book takes us from Alaska’s grueling Iditarod to the Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, and from the quirky Jumping Frog Jubilee in California to groundhog weather predictions from Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania. Through these vivid stories, MeLampy explores how animals are used to build identity, celebrate tradition, and sometimes blur the line between reverence and exploitation.

Inspired by the pioneering work of her grandmother, veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, MeLampy retraced her footsteps to examine how animals are woven into human traditions—and what that says about us.

Be ready for a lively conversation about culture, empathy, and how compassion can help us reimagine celebration in a more ethical, respectful way.

Part investigative travelogue, part cultural commentary, Forget the Camel blends vivid storytelling with a call to deeper compassion. Forget the Camel asks a powerful question: What do these events—and the way we treat animals within them—reveal about our own humanity?

Elizabeth MeLampy is a Harvard-trained environmental lawyer and animal rights advocate whose work has earned her recognition from the Brooks Institute and Harvard Law’s Animal Law & Policy Program. She brings both legal insight and deep empathy to her exploration of the human-animal bond.

📚 Forget the Camel
https://apollopublishers.com/index.ph...

https://www.idausa.org/take-action/

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