Joy Adamson
| Joy Adamson | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Friederike Viktoria Gessner 20 January 1910 Opava, Duchy of Upper and Lower Silesia, Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic |
| Died | 3 January 1980 (aged 69) Shaba National Reserve, Kenya |
| Cause of death | Murdered |
| Occupation |
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| Spouse(s) | Sir Viktor Von Klarwill (1935–1937; divorced) Peter Bally (1938–1944; divorced) George Adamson (1944–1980; her death, couple had been unofficially separated) |
Friederike Victoria "Joy" Adamson (née Gessner; 20 January 1910, Opava – 3 January 1980 Shaba National Reserve) was a naturalist, artist and author. Her book, Born Free, describes her experiences raising a lion cub named Elsa.Born Free was printed in several languages, and made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. In 1977, she was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.
Adamson was born to Victor and Traute Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic), the second of three daughters. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and she went to live with her grandmother. In her autobiography The Searching Spirit, Adamson wrote about her grandmother, saying, "It is to her I owe anything that may be good in me". As a young adult, Adamson considered careers as a concert pianist, and in medicine.
Joy Adamson is best known for her conservation efforts associated with Elsa the Lioness. In 1956, Joy's third husband, George Adamson, in the course of his job as game warden of the Northern Frontier District in Kenya, shot and killed a lioness as she charged him and another warden. George later realized the lioness was just protecting her cubs, which were found nearby in a rocky crevice. Taking them home, Joy and George found it difficult to care for the all the cubs' needs. The two largest cubs, named "Big One" and "Lustica", were passed on to be cared for by a zoo in Rotterdam, and the smallest, "Elsa", was raised by the couple.
After some time living together, the Adamsons decided to set Elsa free rather than send her to a zoo, and spent many months training her to hunt and survive on her own. They were in the end successful, and Elsa became the first lioness successfully released back into the wild, the first to have contact after release, and the first known released lion to have a litter of cubs. The Adamsons kept their distance from the cubs, getting close enough only to photograph them.
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Wikipedia