Game Changer. Glen Martin
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