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