In 1969 two friends were horrified to find a lion cub in a small cage for sale in the “Exotic Animals” Department at Harrad’s Department Store in England. They brought the 35-pound cub home and cared for him. His name was Christian. A local church allowed its grounds to be used for Christian to run and play. When he grew to 185 pounds and got into various kinds of mischief, the friends knew they couldn’t keep him. Working with onservationist John Adamson, whose wife, Joy, wrote the book Born Free about raising a lion cub and ultimately helping it to return to the wild, the two men, John Rendall and Ace Berg, took Christian to Nairobi, Kenya, where Adamson helped Christian to learn how to live with other lions in the wild. After a while, Christian established his own pride with a female lion, had a litter of pups, and became independent. His former keepers wanted to visit him in the wild but were told it would be a wasted mission, that Christian hadn’t been seen in a long time. The keepers still wanted to try and returned to Kenya to search for him. The video above documents their reunion. The music is cheesy, but the video is so wonderful. Maybe you can mute your speakers.
This reunion was the last anyone ever saw of Christian. Fourteen years after this video was made, George Adamson, who helped reintegrate Christian into the wild and protected him, was ambushed and murdered by bandits.
Those of us who love, respect and share our lives and homes with animals know the truth of this story. We have human privilege, which, for the sake of the preservation and continuation of the earth and its creatures, we must learn to relinquish.
