George Adamson had no rival in the Game Department,” Parker wrote in his memoir, What I Tell You Three Times Is True. “He used [strychnine] routinely on hyenas[,] for which he had a pathological dislike. No one with experience in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District will deny that hyenas do a lot of damage, but George’s attitude was extreme.”
In the Monthly Report to the Game Warden for February 1939, Adamson noted: “There are certainly far too many [hyenas] in many places, wherever I find them troublesome I always put down poison.” Adamson also issued strychnine to his subalterns to distribute to local livestock herders. According to Parker, the usual method of poisoning predators at that time was simple, nondiscriminatory, and highly effective: chunks of meat dosed with large quantities of strychnine were tossed about wherever problems had been reported. One night’s work could result in as many as twenty dead hyenas, plus ancillary casualties—lions, leopards, lesser cats such as caracals and servals, wild dogs, jackals, and bat-eared foxes. As was the case for most other game wardens, Adamson also shot antelope for food and killed elephants on license; he then sold the ivory he obtained, which bolstered his income considerably.
Adamson’s techniques were standard for the 1940s; indeed, his predator control efforts were based on the “best available science” of the time. As for killing elephants and selling their ivory, elephants were plentiful, and the trade was utterly licit. Indeed, according to Parker, selling ivory was essential to a warden’s survival: the pay was abysmally low. “It was how you made ends meet,” Parker observed during an interview in his Langata home. “Money problems were part of the job.”
But Adamson’s ultimate career, of course, wasn’t as a Game Department ranger. His real vocation began in 1956 in Meru, when he was forced to shoot a charging lioness. He subsequently discovered that she had been protecting her cubs, which were hidden in the bush nearby. Joy Adamson undertook the task of raising the cubs, which prospered under her care. The two largest, Lustica and the Big One, were ultimately sent to a zoo in Rotterdam. But the couple had become inordinately attached to Elsa, the runt of the litter; they decided to keep her.
Domesticating wildlife was something of a tradition among white colonials in Kenya. Colobus monkeys, bush babies, hornbills, even kudu, warthogs, and bush pigs—all had been drafted as pets by settlers at one time or another. In Laikipia, tales are still told of settlers who domesticated spotted hyenas: highly intelligent and sociable by nature, they supposedly were as faithful, friendly, and eager to please as border collies.
Lions, of course, were another matter. Even the most ardent field researcher would be hard pressed to describe them as highly acute. Laurence Frank, a conservation biologist who works in Kenya and who specializes in large predators, describes lions as “the big dumb blondes of the veldt.” With some notable exceptions they are completely unpredictable, generally focused on obtaining and consuming prey. And the Adamsons, no tyros in the bush, were aware of the danger inherent in keeping lions around a camp; they decided to return Elsa to the wild. At this point, they were on their own, their actions unsanctioned by the Game Department. They trained Elsa to hunt, released her, and were gratified when the lioness had cubs of her own. In 1961, Elsa died from babesiosis, a parasitic disease, and her cubs—named Jespah, Gopa, and Little Elsa—became local menaces, killing livestock and threatening people. So George Adamson trapped them and transported them to Tanzania, where they were released in the Serengeti.
Joy wrote about Elsa’s training and release to the wild and published the account as Born Free in 1960. Living Free, the story of Elsa and her cubs, followed in 1961. The two books launched the Adamsons as international celebrities—and laid the groundwork for the conflation of conservation, modern media, and anthropomorphic obsession. The Adamsons changed the way the developed world viewed wild Africa. But did the change serve a larger and better end? Was conservation actually advanced?
Adamson’s supporters maintain conservation was not simply advanced by his efforts; it was transformed and supercharged, changed from a stodgy academic backwater to an international cause célèbre.Will Travers, the executive director of Born Free, the conservation group that grew out of the Adamsons’ work, is the son of Bill Travers, the British actor who played George Adamson in the movie Born Free. As a young child, Will Travers met Adamson on the Kenyan set of the film, where the erstwhile warden served as technical consultant. Adamson became a close friend of the Travers family, and Will Travers visited Adamson’s camp in the Northern Frontier District several times through the 1970s; Adamson and Bill Travers ultimately collaborated on a book, the last book Adamson produced before his death in 1989.
Will Travers recalls Adamson as a man who was not necessarily reserved but quiet, measured—in a word, calm. “He never felt the need to be overly demonstrative, to attract attention,” Travers recalls. “And that only added to his charisma. People sensed George had found what he was looking for, and that made them want a piece of it.”
In virtually any situation, Adamson was unflappable. Travers recalls a time in the 1980s when Adamson visited the Travers family in London. He came to the house in a brown tweed suit, his pipe clenched between his teeth. “It was the first time he had visited the U.K. in twenty years,” Travers says.“My dad got him a drink and then asked him if he wanted to watch some television—George mentioned he had never seen color TV. So we turned it on, and there was this British entertainer, Matt Monro, and another fellow singing a duet of ‘Born Free.’ The coincidence just floored us, but George merely showed polite, somewhat detached interest and sipped his whiskey.”
Still, Travers says, Adamson was passionate about his work. And it was passion based on compassion—for the individual lions in his charge. Anthropomorphism? Yes, avers Travers. But that was what made the message effective. “I’m not an enemy of anthropomorphism,” Travers says. “We can only see and interpret the world as human beings—it’s an urge that can’t be eradicated. George knew that, he didn’t resist it, and that’s why the world responded the way it did to his work. You can treat your dog in the cold, scientific way many researchers use with wildlife, but who does that? To connect people to dogs, anthropomorphism must be involved.”
Travers acknowledges that Adamson did his share of killing, including elephants. But, he emphasizes, Adamson was a work in progress, not a hypocrite. “Like all of us, George was on a journey,” Travers says. “His opinions evolved as he aged. By the time I really got to know him, his views on wildlife, particularly elephants, had changed completely. Their intelligence, their social relationships, deeply moved him. He once told me that he thought the killing of an elephant should be a capital crime.”
During an interview with Travers, I related a story of a colloquy that occurred between Laurence Frank, a lion and hyena researcher, and Rosie Woodroffe, a biologist who specializes in African wild dogs. The duo had been working together, fitting telemetry devices to predators in Laikipia, south of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. They had found a cheetah in one of their snares—a rare occurrence, since cheetahs don’t normally come to bait. After tranquilizing the animal they took tissue specimens and placed a telemetry collar around its neck. Woodroffe was clearly enraptured by the cat. “Oh, Laurence,” she cooed, “it’s so cute and fuzzy!” Frank looked up from his work, an irritated expression on his face. “Not so,” he snapped. “It’s a superbly adapted predator!”
Travers laughs at the anecdote. “The thing is, they were both right,” he says. “Of course a cheetah is a superbly adapted predator, but it’s also extremely cute and fuzzy. And it’s the cute and fuzzy aspects that capture the public, that can actually translate into effective conservation initiatives on the ground. If you don’t have ‘cute and fuzzy,’ only a small subset of human beings will be interested in conservation.”
Travers views Adamson as the first of a cadre of conservationists who unabashedly and unapologetically invested individual wild species with qualities that human beings find sympathetic. “After George, you had Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, Hugo van Lawick
