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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 strychnine, to the gun when it came to eliminating bothersome predators, and he spread it with a particularly liberal hand wherever he found hyenas. “As a poisoner 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 with wild dogs, Dian Fossey with mountain gorillas, Iain Douglas-Hamilton with elephants,” says Travers. All, he observes, advanced the conservation of threatened species by emphasizing the charisma of the individual animals. “And emphasizing that charisma ultimately delivers real benefits in terms of habitat conservation,” he continues. “I use George’s work as a perfect example. The Kora Reserve [in central Kenya] was changed to a national park because of the attention George generated for Elsa and lions in general. So now you have Kora at five hundred square kilometers situated adjacent to Meru National Park at eight hundred square kilometers; basically, you’ve encompassed an entire ecosystem, preserved a major chunk of critical habitat, not just for lions, but for a wide array of African wildlife.”

But other conservationists and most scientists view Adamson’s contribution differently. Tom McShane, a former director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Central Africa program and the principal investigator for Advancing Conservation in a Social Context, a program headquartered at the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, thinks that Adamson represents a major shift in the culture and politics of conservation: the practice of naming individual animals. “It changed the debate in many ways,” says McShane. “It first gained currency with Adamson and was later amplified by Goodall, Fossey, and Douglas-Hamilton. A kind of ‘animalism’ came out of that impulse: it moved conservation from broad-based ecological approaches to an obsession with individual animals.”

Such animalism hasn’t served wildlife well in terms of achieving real progress on the ground, McShane says; indeed, it has subverted the real mission, drawing attention away from the essential issues of integrating local people into conservation initiatives and preserving critical habitat to apotheosizing cute critters. On the other hand, McShane admits, the kind of conservation promulgated by Born Free, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and like-minded groups has demonstrated that their approach is extremely efficient at getting people to open up their wallets: “If you want to raise lots of money, you need species that possess perceived humanlike qualities, such as chimps and elephants, have big soulful eyes, like seals, or are fuzzy and noble-looking, such as the large cats, wolves, and bears. You see it in all the wildlife documentaries; they draw you in with these predictable cues. But that kind of approach doesn’t work for spiders, lizards, or crocodiles, though they may be just as important from the perspectives of ecological integrity and conservation. It’s worrisome.”

I mentioned to McShane a conversation I had overheard during a reception at Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia. Mpala, a forty-eight-thousand-acre tract of scrub and grassland maintained in part by the Smithsonian Institution and Princeton University, supports a variety of conservation initiatives. During the fete, a man I later identified through photographs as Fritz Vollrath, a director of Save the Elephants, was talking pachyderms with a local rancher. Dressed in a polo shirt that bore the Save the Elephants logo, Vollrath, white-haired and sharp-featured, was highly animated. “Bees,” he said. “They have a word for bees!” He explained that elephants can communicate the presence of disturbed bees to one another through—for lack of a better word—language. The rancher, though amiable, seemed dubious. Later research revealed that Vollrath has published a paper opining that the sound of disturbed bees might be deployed to keep elephants at bay; one of the coauthors is Iain Douglas-Hamilton.

McShane seemed less than charmed by the story. “That kind of thinking can be very dangerous in a place like Laikipia,” he said.“On the one hand, you have very large mammals running around causing a good deal of trouble for local residents, and on the other you have a great many people studying the animals and naming them, claiming they have language, arguing that every single one must be preserved. Then the guys who were studying the elephants get back on planes for Europe or the United States, well-pleased with their efforts, while the people who have to deal with elephants eating their maize or stomping their cows are stuck in Laikipia. It impacts the hard management decisions that have to be made to ensure that both elephants and people thrive in Laikipia. It skews public opinion, it influences the Kenyan government, and ultimately it affects national [Kenyan] policy.”

Some wildlife researchers hold a more indulgent view of Adamson and the role he played in combining wildlife conservation and animal rights. John Robinson, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society—the oldest conservation group in the United States and the owner of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Aquarium—feels Adamson was first and foremost a devotee of wild Africa; his work with Elsa and his other lions was therefore a manifestation of a larger passion. “Adamson clearly identified with nature, and the way he expressed that was through engagement with individual animals,” Robinson said. And that, he added, was not necessarily a bad thing. “I grew up with Joy Adamson’s books, and I aspired to the life and the ethic they portrayed. Many conservationists and scientists will say the same thing.”

Robinson feels animal rights and wildlife conservation grow out of the same impulse, though they are not the same things. “There are superficial similarities,” he says, “and there are points where they converge. There are other points, of course, where they diverge. That can cause problems, deep disagreements. But for Adamson, concern for his lions and conservation were the same thing.”

It isn’t difficult to understand Adamson’s motivations, Robinson says; identifying with wildlife—particularly species that are large, attractive, or intelligent—is a natural impulse for human beings. “It’s easier to do it with, say, a lion or an elephant than a nematode,” he says. “From the animal advocacy perspective, lions and elephants seem particularly valuable, deeply worthy of effort and love. [WCS] manages thousands of animals in our zoos, and I see this expressed every day. Our curators who work with the animals, particularly certain charismatic mammals, develop deep bonds of affection for them. From the standpoint of true conservation, however, lions and elephants may not be more significant than a nematode, particularly if we consider the nematode in the context of the ecosystem it inhabits. That raises the sticky issue of evaluating the value of different species. How do you do it objectively? Clearly, it’s complicated by animal rights issues.”

Although Adamson can be credited with popularizing a philosophy that is changing the course of conservation in Africa, it is unlikely he saw himself as a revolutionary. Adamson, says Parker, was first and foremost a romantic, someone who was so caught up in his solipsistic dream that—from the view of Game Department professionals, at least—he went utterly rogue. “He had a magnificent delusion,” Parker says. In his Langata home, he rummages in his files and extracts a yellowed memo dated November 22, 1958, written by Adamson and sent to the secretary of the East African Professional Hunters’ Association in Nairobi:

Dear Sir,

This is to inform you that I have recently released my tame lioness

“Elsa” on the Ura River in Isiolo area No. 6, at a large rock outcrop called

Dungie Akaite, about 34 miles from the Kinna Duka, along the Kinna-

Tharaka track.

Would you therefore please warn any of your members who may have

booked the area during the coming hunting season, to avoid, if possible,

making camp on the Ura.

Elsa being a particularly friendly animal, might walk into a tent and

with the best of intentions, cause alarm to the nervous.

Few safaris visit the Ura, as there is little to attract them there.

Yours faithfully,

G.A.G. Adamson

Senior Game Warden

Northern Province

As a matter of fact, Elsa wasn’t so friendly, says Parker: she bit one hunter on the arm, whether or not her intentions were benign. More to the point, Parker continues, Adamson’s work militated against true conservation, because it elevated essentially tame animals over the preservation of wild animals and the habitat that supports them. Further, Parker says, Adamson “committed crimes for which he should have been jailed. He killed lions in Meru National Park to save Boy [a rehabilitated lion that had been released], and he was caught shooting antelope to feed his lions in Serengeti National Park. At a certain point, [Kenya’s chief warden] Willie Hale had a talk with George and told him, ‘George, this can’t go on—you’ve become a lion-keeper.’ And George had to leave the department.”

FIGURE 2. A memo from George Adamson to the secretary of the East African Professional Hunters’ Association announcing the release of his lioness Elsa to the wild and requesting forbearance from hunters and wardens alike. Despite Adamson’s assurances that Elsa was a friendly beast, she later bit a hunter on the arm. (Courtesy of Glen Martin)

By that time, of course, it hardly mattered. George and Joy Adamson had become stars in the conservation firmament, and they had turned their tame lions, paradoxically, into ambassadors for wild Africa. Parker found this a delicious irony. “He created the myth about himself within the Game Department through his reports and writing,” Parker wrote in his 2004 book, What I Tell You Three Times Is True. “Outside the Department others added to it. His delightful nature predisposed people to believe the best of him. . . . From the purely conservation standpoint, his records prove an ineffectual career. Though this is indisputable, it is neither what the public wished to hear nor makes him a lesser man.”

By the late 1980s, the Adamsons’ cathected, highly subjective view of African wildlife was ascendant. In a very real way, they gave their lives for their vision, which only served to reinforce it. Joy was stabbed to death in early January 1980 at Shaba Game Reserve in northern Kenya, where she had been studying leopards. A former camp worker, Paul Ekai, was convicted of the murder, though he claimed he had been tortured by Kenyan police into confessing—a story that cannot be dismissed out of hand, given the poor reputation of the country’s police agencies among both Kenyan citizens and NGOs. (In a 2004 prison cell interview, Ekai recanted and said he had killed Adamson, but only because she shot him in the leg after he complained about not being paid.)

There is little mystery to George Adamson’s demise, however. He died at the age of eighty-three in 1989 when he engaged three Somali bandits who were attacking a tourist visiting his remote camp in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. Adamson charged the shifta in his vehicle, and they opened fire, killing him and two of his assistants. The brutal martyrdom of the Adamsons was a tragedy for all who knew them, yet it served their cause greatly, casting the issue of conservation irrevocably into a chiaroscuro of black and white from which all shadings of gray were drained.

Anthropologist Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape) credited Born Free with changing the way an entire generation viewed wildlife. Never again would Africa’s animals be seen as “game” by the world at large. Never again would their conservation be a dispassionate process. Adamson shifted the preservation of the continent’s wildlife from an issue for the mind to one of the heart.