into the forest, looking at an Africa that exists only in his mind, in the memories of a few peers, and in some shrinking islands of functional habitat.
But he is hardly morose. He has a profound talent for inhabiting and enjoying the moment, and comparisons of the past to the present don’t vitiate his pleasure in contemplating both. “I’ve enjoyed all of it, enjoyed it tremendously,” Parker says, recalling his years as a soldier, warden, game cropper, and man of letters. “But I was never emotionally invested in it. Most people who know me say that was probably my weakness, but it was really my greatest strength. I never felt that things had to be a certain way, that I could or should fight trends that were beyond the power of anyone to reasonably affect. I certainly didn’t enjoy all the developments I’ve witnessed, but I didn’t let them depress me. I only had one life to live, and depression wouldn’t have made me more effective in my work in any event.”
As to the future, Parker admits to deep pessimism: “There is already famine in the Northern Frontier District. People are foraging in the bush for whatever they can eat, some are dying. And that’s with fewer than forty million people in the country. Twenty years from now, it will be seventy million people. Again, that growth will come at the expense of wildlife and wildlife habitat.”
Nor does Parker think effective policies will be implemented to sustain the wildlife that remains. The trend in conservationist thinking continues to emphasize the warm, cuddly fuzziness of individual animals over habitat management. “As an example, take my specialty, elephants,” Parker observes. “Anyone who knows anything at all about these issues knows that for maximum biodiversity in forest ecosystems, you have to control elephant numbers. There is no alternative, given that migration options for elephants have now been eliminated. But the chances for a sustained rational program [of elephant culling] in this country are nil.”
The current zeitgeist, in short, supports anthropomorphism. Africa once seemed isolated from this trend, but no longer. Indeed, the modern apotheosis of the individual wild animal actually began in Kenya about sixty years ago, and the man who started it all—George Adamson—was one of Parker’s contemporaries and colleagues.
CHAPTER 2
The Man Who Hated Hyenas
The syrupy strains and the histrionic lyrics will still be recalled by people of a certain age. But despite their schmaltz, they created a beatific vision, one evoking a time and place central to the human dream, if not human reality:
Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your hear-r-r-rt.
The song, the eponymous theme for the film Born Free, won an Oscar in 1966 and hit number seven on the charts. It was inescapable that year, blaring from every car radio and home stereo, whistled or hummed on the streets. And the film—a loose interpretation of the efforts of the Kenya Game Department warden George Adamson and his wife, Joy, to rehabilitate and release lions to the wild—enraptured the public. Unlike all other Africa-themed popular movies to that date, Born Free wasn’t about safaris, parlous interactions with wildlife and tribal people, or intrepid white explorers slogging through jungles and across savannas. It portrayed the African lion as a complex animal capable of receiving and reciprocating human affection. Lions, the film implied, warranted preservation simply because of their sentience and the role they have played in Africa’s ecosystems. In essence, Born Free was the first environmentally themed movie. It got people in Europe and North America thinking about Africa’s wildlife as something other than a potential head on a wall or rug on a floor.
The Adamsons, of course, were not the primary protagonists of Born Free. That distinction belonged to Elsa, the lioness whom the couple raised from a cub and ultimately released to the wild. Their efforts with Elsa and other lions were seminal, marking the first real attempt at establishing a protocol for the rehabilitation of African predators. Their vision has since grown into a large and discrete segment of the general environmental movement. Wildlife rehabilitation is now pursued on a very large scale, involving everything from pachyderms to pinnipeds. When practiced as part of species recovery, it is a valuable adjunct subsumed into a larger mission. In other instances, it is a goal in its own right, one devoted to alleviating suffering and maximizing survival opportunities for individual animals. The thirty-two-million-dollar Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, for example, devotes much of its funds and a good deal of the energy of its large staff of professionals and volunteers to saving injured, ill, or starving California sea lions, a species that numbers around three hundred thousand individuals off the state’s coast and is hardly in imminent danger of extinction. For the supporters of the Marine Mammal Center, each sea lion is precious and deserving of extraordinary effort to succor. Adamson helped inculcate modern society with this way of thinking through his early efforts with Elsa, Boy, and his other leonine charges.
Today, Born Free, an organization founded on the Adamsons’ vision, is one of the world’s foremost conservation-cum-animal-rights groups; George Adamson has been canonized as its founding saint. Both his life and his demise work toward this end: he drew international attention with his efforts to return captive lions to the wild, and he died a hero’s death fighting Somali shifta in 1989. And without doubt he looked the part. He was spare and sunburnt, with thick white hair that hung to his shoulders, and a trimmed white goatee; a big briar pipe was omnipresent in his teeth. Yet he did not start off as a doting, charismatic animal lover—and indeed, his affections were selective throughout his life.
He was born in 1906 in Cheltenham, England, and by 1938 he was in Kenya, where he took a job with the colony’s game department. He was assigned to patrol the Northern Game Reserve, a huge swath of wild forest and bush that constituted much of northern Kenya, including the Laikipia Plateau, the Aberdares, and Mount Kenya. He served briefly in the British military during the early years of World War II. After returning from the war, he was provided with a contingent of game scouts from local tribes and ultimately given jurisdiction over the wildlife that inhabited an eighty-five-thousand-square-mile chunk of territory that ran east from Lake Turkana and north from the Tana River to the Somali border—somewhat less than half of Kenya.
FIGURE 1. George Adamson in a contemplative moment.Adamson looked like central casting’s idea of a Kenyan ranger and warden. Highly idiosyncratic in his approach to his job, he was often at odds with his bosses and mainline conservationists. No one could dispute his personal ethics or courage. He died at the age of eighty-three at the Kora Reserve fighting Somali bandits who had attacked a tourist. (© Bill Travers/www.bornfree.org.uk)
Adamson’s job throughout his association with Kenya’s game agencies was to protect the wildlife, but he also was required to protect human beings, livestock, and property from the depredations of wildlife. As a consequence, he was required to kill quite a few animals. According to records obtained by Ian Parker (who served with Adamson in the Game Department, knew him well, and considered him likable and charismatic if quixotic), he reported killing fifty lions, fifty-two elephants, three rhinos, four leopards, and five buffalo from 1938 through 1949. The beasts were dispatched for various reasons, including killing or menacing human beings.
Adamson also recorded dispatching two African wild dogs, not because they threatened people or livestock, but because he considered their mode of killing prey brutal and found them somewhat repugnant. But if he disliked wild dogs—now threatened throughout their range and the object of massive attention from conservation biologists and animal lovers alike—he absolutely loathed spotted hyenas. Indeed, says Parker, Adamson’s wildlife casualty reports are wholly inadequate, because Adamson preferred poison, primarily
