Born Free

"Yes. I want everyone to read about how Elsa the lioness not only returned to her own world, but in that world where she was a lioness she still had room for her human adoptive parents. It was this book that inspired me, as a 12-year-old girl, to come here and work with wild animals. Read how Gareth Patterson had the same experiences with the lions he saved, after George Adamson [Joy’s husband] was murdered. Gareth took the cubs to try and give them the one thing that Joy and George gave back to their lions, the ability to be free as they were born to be. Read any book out there about man working with a wild animal and returning that animal to its real life, the natural world. Read anything about man or woman living with a wild animal and getting to know it as it is (not trying to change it to their way of thinking). No elephant wants a man on his back. No lion wants to walk with tourists if, at the end of his ‘lion walking with the tourists scenario’, when he is bigger, he is shot in a canned hunt. Sadly, many of the lions and cheetahs that are used to ‘walk with the tourists’ are killed or caged when they get too big. I met my first wild lion when I initially moved to Africa and had the privilege of seeing them in the bush, in their world. George Adamson’s lions were lions that had been taken on by people who thought they were helping them, by buying them as cubs from dealers, or they were circus lions that had been rescued, or lions from lion hunts where the parent had been killed, and so on. When I stayed with George he had no lions in the camp, but there were lions he had released back into the bush. These lions would visit him and if he called them they would come to his call. One that did come in was a lion called Lucifer. He had been out there in the wild for quite some time when I arrived. George had taught Lucifer to be a lion again and then released him. George would be sleeping outside his hut on his bed, snoring loudly. I would watch Lucifer, this amazing male lion, come close to the fence and make little mewing type noises at George. Lucifer would use his paw and kind of push it against the fence as if trying to touch George. Lucifer totally related to George and yet he lived out there as a wild animal, how he was meant to be. George wore a kikoi most of the time, a waist-high wrap-around Kenyan cloth. His hair was long and yellow and yet he spoke the Queen’s English and had the manners of an aristocrat. He was everything I hoped he would be – I had hero-worshipped him since I was 12. Eventually, at 83, he was murdered protecting one of his female guests. The poachers who had totally destroyed the Kora area killed George. The politics of wildlife can be worse than any political arena in the first world."