Christian, the Book

You, of course, remember the video of Christian the lion being reunited with his owners (in time to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You) that was generating mega-hits on youtube. Well Christian's former owners have re-released their book about their quasi-pet, entitled A Lion Called Christian.

I'm here to report it is a very quick read--big print, small pages, and fun as well as fascinating. As the authors, Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, detail in the Introduction, they wrote the book in 1971, when they were both in their early twenties, and they have tampered with very little as far as the story line goes. What they have added are some updates and some corrections. As they admit, they were both proud of their original effort, as they should be.

Among the things that we learn is that Christian was not just released willy-nilly into the wild. He was placed into the custody of George Adamson, husband of Joy Adamson (of Born Free fame), which explains how the reunion came to be in the first place. George, until his death, continued his wife's work with lions at Kampi ya Simba, Kora, in Nairobi. John Rendell remains on the Board of the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust, which continues to fund conservation projects to this day.

It is also clear that Bourke and Rendall had no intention of keeping Chrisitan indefinitely. They knew he would reach a point when he would be too big and too strong for them to control and they never intended to make him into a trendy pet. Christian was very lucky in that regard.

What I find especially fascinating about the story is that it mirrors society's transformation from the freewheeling 1970s, when you truly could purchase a wild, exotic pet at Harrods "Zoo," to the conservation, return-animals-to-the-wild and protect endangered species mentality we have today. In this regard, Bourke and Rendall were most definitely ahead of their time and perhaps that is even more remarkable than the reunion footage.

Joy Adamson, of course, probably had as much to do with this mindset as these two kind former hippies, but in a nutshell, if you view this book as a window into society's transformation, I think you will find it an enlightening and entertaining read.

No fooling.