The Apocalypse of the Animals

Frédéric Rossif invites us to explore animal language and behavior through their everyday habits. As species vanish, we become ever more aware of each one’s role in humanity's biological and symbolic balance. From the bee to the gorilla, including the puma, the flamingo, and the blue-footed bobbie.

For the animal world to survive, humans must learn to coexist with animals. These images reveal shared experiences of cohabitation: in France, in the reserves of Thoiry or along the Atlantic, let us follow the lion, the tiger, and the doe; in Siberia, where reindeer and Inuit help each other endure the cold; in India, where over the years humans and elephants have developed a relationship of close complicity and mutual respect; and in Cuba, where crocodile reserves have been established to repopulate Brazil's Amazon River.

Frédéric Rossif offers us across Africa a vivid image of our most distant past, which we like to believe the elephant has preserved in its slow memory. The pelican, the osprey, the koala, the chameleon, and above all the elephant, which symbolizes "the immutable" through its stability and longevity, are the living reflection of the African soul and culture, which have forged a genuine intimacy with the animal world.

Prince Bernard of the Netherlands introduces national reserves around the world dedicated solely to species survival and animal protection. In Italy, within bird sanctuaries, we follow the kiwi and the heron; in Australia, the koala, the living model for our teddy bear; in the United States, the bison destined to reclaim their lost lands and their European cousins raised for meat and skin. The apotheosis comes in Gran Paradiso National Park, where only a patient animal lover could witness and film the chamois’s dance of freedom.

Wolves are among the hunted animals, declares Gérard Ménatory, who, in his park in Lozère, raises and tames wolves. His experience demonstrates the inaccuracy of certain legends: through the story of this tamed she-wolf, unable to bend to the demands of her clan, and the unusual images of this eagle that does not attack, of these wolves that are neither submissive nor cruel, he shows us that this animal never kills for pleasure but only out of necessity.

Let us enter the aquarium of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and look through the eyes of a child at the metamorphoses of life: a whole palette of colorful fish, disproportionately large or small, beautiful or ugly according to our human criteria, of carnivorous plants, seem to frighten the child. But don't we frighten them ourselves when our oil tankers, discharging fuel oil into the open sea, have become the new pirate ships?