WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP - put me to sleep

The non-fiction book WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP the EMOTIONAL LIVES of ANIMALS was a major disappointment for me.  Being a huge animal lover and long time vegetarian, I thought I would be in sympatico with the author Jeffrey Masson, but it turns out he is a wacko.  Masson's Phd. is in Sanskrit and Indian Studies hardly makes him an authority in the realm of animal sciences.  In fact, Masson admits in his prologue, while visitng an Indian game reserve reknown for wild elephants, he tried to communicate to an elephant in Sanskrit only to provoke the animal into chasing him down and nearly killing him.  What an idiot! Still, I thought I'd find this work to be enlightening and entertaining.  What I found was a rambling of anecdotes on anthropomorphism:  the assigning of human characteristic to animals.  Masson bemoans the lack of scientific research to establish the existence of emotions in animals and fails to provide anything that would corroborate this phenomenon.  I compare Masson's work to Project Nim where a Columbia psychologist raised a new born chimp in a family enviornment which proved to be a debacle and a painful documentary to watch.  Masson was preaching to the choir to treat animals with compassion but even animal advocates would weep from this missed opportunity.