"Elsa was now twenty-seven months old, almost full-grown. We had always known that we could not keep her free indefinitely at Isiolo. Our original idea had been to send her to join her sisters at the Rotterdam Zoo... But now she had taken her future into her own paws, and her latest developments were decisive in altering our plans for her... To release Elsa back to the wild would be an experiment well worth trying."
The life of Joy Adamson changed forever on the day that her husband, George, shot a lioness in northern Kenya. There was nothing too unusual about that. George Adamson was a senior game warden, and one of his myriad responsibilities was to track down and destroy lions which were proving dangerous to Kenya's human inhabitants, either as cattle-killers or man-eaters. After dispatching this particular lioness, however, Adamson soon found three newly-orphaned female cubs. These he promptly brought home to his wife, who took to hand-rearing them.
The two larger of the cubs were eventually sent to the Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands, where they lived fairly conventional lives. The third and smaller of the cubs, the one who had most endeared herself to the Adamsons, they decided to keep for a little longer. Her name was Elsa.
Born Free is the story of Elsa's unusual life with the Adamsons, traveling across the wilderness of northern Kenya in their company and undertaking a series of adventures, from chasing poachers to meeting elephants and rhinos to swimming in the Indian Ocean. Any story of a person living with a full-grown lioness is bound to be unusual in itself, but what makes Elsa's story extra unusual is what happened next. Coming to terms with the reality that they couldn't keep her forever, they decided to do what at the time many considered to be impossible - to release her into the wild.
There are several cases of zoos and aquariums releasing animals back into the wild, but nothing quite like Elsa. She was hand-reared, had almost no experience with other lions (apart from her own sisters, parted at an early age), and had never made her own kill. With no parents or pride to teach her how to interact with other lions or how to hunt, preparing her for life in the wild was a daunting challenge, and the Adamsons encountered more than a few setbacks in their efforts. Eventually, they are met with success - Elsa lives a wild life in the company of wild lions.
Born Free has also been dramatized and turned into a movie (best known, perhaps, for its irritatingly sappy theme song), which better introduced Elsa to popular audiences.
Ironically, despite the title, I consider Elsa's story to be an asset for zoos and aquariums. It demonstrates that animals reared under human care (and Elsa might as well have been born in a zoo - before her adoption by the Adamsons, she and her sisters had never even left their den or been in "the wild") can be successfully reintroduced in the wild, live, hunt, and breed. If a hand-reared pet lion (a social animal that receives a lot of teaching from a parent prior to independence) can be released, then there is hope for other behaviorally-complex species, especially if they are set up for success from birth with their eventual reintroduction being the consistent goal.
I've sometimes heard zoo-critics say that breeding programs are a waste of time because many animals wouldn't be able to thrive in the wild. My argument would be, if Elsa can do it, almost anyone can do it.
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