Elsa

Elsa was a lioness of Kenya and, through the book and film Born Free, probably the most famous lion who has ever lived. She and her two sisters were only a few days old when, on 1 February 1956, the game warden George Adamson shot their mother in self-defence as she charged him, and only afterwards realised that she had been guarding her cubs. George and his wife Joy took the three cubs home. The two larger sisters, Big One and Lustica, were sent to Rotterdam Zoo, but Joy kept Elsa and set out to do what had never been done: teach a hand-raised lioness to live in the wild.

Elsa grew up almost as a member of the household, but the Adamsons slowly taught her to hunt and to survive on her own, and in the Meru area of Kenya she was released. She became the first lioness known to have been successfully returned to the wild, the first to keep a friendship with her human family after release, and the first known to raise cubs of her own: when she was three, she brought two males and a female, named Jespah, Gopa and Little Elsa, to meet the Adamsons. Joy’s book Born Free, published in 1960, made her famous around the world.

In January 1961, with local people growing hostile and the authorities asking the Adamsons to move Elsa and her cubs, Elsa fell ill with babesiosis, a tick-borne blood disease, and died on 24 January 1961, aged about five. She was buried in what is now Meru National Park, where her grave can still be visited. Her cubs were later moved to the Serengeti, and her story went on to inspire the 1966 film Born Free and the Born Free Foundation.