“Elephant Mountain” by Debbie Ethell

Our longtime friend and FOZE advocate, Debbie Ethell, shares her latest book exploring the origins of elephant breeding in captivity at the Oregon Zoo—revealing a history that holds the key to understanding the high stakes for elephants’ futures. With a perfect blend of history, mystery, and memoir, Elephant Mountain exposes how human ambition and secrecy shaped the fate of elephants in captivity—and why their freedom matters more than ever today.

Here is a description of her second book in The Will of Heaven series.

“Elephant Mountain is the gripping tale of Debbie Ethell, a young woman whose fascination with an elephant skull in a bone museum in Portland, Oregon leads her down an unexpected path. What begins as a curiosity about the tragic love story of Morgan Berry, the man who gave us Packy (the first baby elephant born in a U.S. zoo in forty-four years), and Eloise Berchtold, one of the world’s foremost animal trainers, soon becomes a chilling mystery.

The couple—each killed by separate elephants they raised—left behind a legacy tangled in secrets, cover-ups, and unanswered questions. As former owners of a secluded elephant farm just outside Woodland, Washington, Morgan and Eloise’s lives and deaths hold the key to a truth long buried beneath layers of deception.

Determined to uncover what really happened, Debbie calls on her background as a conservation research scientist and the support of her closest friend, who is facing a life-threatening illness. While confronting her own struggles with recovery from alcoholism, she draws strength, wisdom, and courage from a herd of wild elephants in Kenya, a group she has studied since childhood. Their resilience and stories of survival mirror her own, guiding her as she delves deeper into a mystery that will test her resolve and forever reshape her relationship with the past—and with the elephants themselves.”

Order Elephant Mountain here.

* The paperback will be available everywhere books are sold, and the audiobook is currently available on Audible where anyone can listen to a sample from her book for free.