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