Born Free

Product Information

This beautiful commemorative edition celebrates each declaration with an illustration by an internationally renowned artist or illustrator, including Jackie Morris, Satoshi Kitamura, Catherine Anholt and Laurence Anholt, Marie-Louise Gay, Jessica Souhami, Peter Sis, Mick Manning and Brita Granström, Hong Song-Dam, and many others. We began long-term support for Limbe Wildlife Centre, Cameroon – a respected sanctuary for orphaned chimps, gorillas and other primates with extensive community education programmes. They decided to set her free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. We joined Wildlife and Countryside Link – a coalition of British wildlife organisations to chair work on wildlife crime and trade. Immortalised in film by Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, this is the original story for a new generation of readers to discover for themselves.

The book was rereleased in 2017 by Pan Books as part of their Pan 70th anniversary collection, celebrating their best-loved, best-selling stories. The interactions between the Adamsons and Elsa, and later her cubs are beautiful and showed how intelligent lions can be. This is the weakest point, as certain sections, probably those written more from the sources than directly from memory, are a bit dry. The book Born Free (1960) was followed by two other books, Living Free (1961) and Forever Free (1963). They share a magical once-in-a-lifetime relationship with her and are able to visit her often even after she has become a "wild" lioness capable of injuring or even killing them.The main thing I took away from this is the fact that you can't help but fall in love with Elsa and the other lions throughout. The book is an omnibus containing all three of the Born free series, featuring the real life story of Elsa the lioness and her curious relationship with humans and the wild in equal parts.

We supported a project in Guinea-Bissau to develop a country-scale conservation strategy for western chimpanzees and other primates. Our support for Animals Asia began, with the aim of stopping exploitation of moon bears, cruelly milked for their bile, and providing care for rescued bears in sanctuaries in China and Vietnam. Elsa is constantly taken out to the bush but fails to make a kill, getting attacked by a warthog on one of these outings. The film was based on Joy Adamson’s best-selling book of the same name – the extraordinary tale of how she and her husband George raised Elsa, an orphaned lion cub, before releasing her into the wilderness of Kenya.

We helped International Animal Rescue care for rescued ‘dancing’ sloth bears in India, by funding a vet clinic. Of the three lion cubs, Big One and Lustica — meaning “Jolly One” — were the biggest, strongest, and most vocal of the litter. We launched It’s Time Parliament Changed Its Act report and campaign with the RSPCA, to end the use of wild animals in UK circuses. This captivating story of the Adamson's adoption of Elsa the lioness and later on her three cubs is now 60 years old.