Текст на английском языке с переводом № 5.2

Born Free

Friederike Victoria Gessner (better known by her pen name¹ as Joy Adamson) was an Austrian-born writer, painter and naturalist famous for her work raising and reintroducing big cats into the wild.

Briefly considering a career of a musician or a doctor at first, in 1937 Friederike was forced to migrate from turbulent² Vienna into wild Kenya. Being very easy-going by nature, she made friends wherever she went. Soon enough she found herself very close to many researchers, biologists and wildlife conservators who were prominent³ in the area. Thus she spent her younger years as a naturalist, doing sketches and making observations on various flora and fauna.

Her greatest work was yet to come, though. When she was 42, her then-husband George Adamson, a senior wildlife warden⁴, was asked to protect local farmers from a lioness that was threatening them. As it turned out later, the lioness was simply protecting her cubs from encroaching⁵ human settlement. After successfully fighting the lioness off, George and Friederike decided to adopt those little lions. Tending to all three of them at home has proven very difficult, so the couple eventually donated two larger cubs to Rotterdam Zoo, and took the smallest one, Elsa, for themselves.

As the young lioness was growing up very fast, Friederike has realised that soon they wouldn't be able to provide for her, so she decided to teach Elsa how to act on her own, hunt, and live in the wild. Taking this duty very diligently⁶ and treating Elsa as an equal rather than as a pet, Friederike (who by this point has already adopted her pen name) has managed to succeed. Roughly two years later Elsa, now a wild lioness, brought a litter⁷ of her own, and those three cubs were the first ever to be born by a domesticated lioness that was reintroduced into the wild.

This was an unprecedented story in a naturalist world, and soon enough Joy Adamson had the attention of both scientists and cinematographers. The story of Elsa was documented in her book, Born Free, that was also made into a motion picture in 1966.

Encouraged by her first successes, Joy shifted her focus to cheetahs. While still a rather large cat and a very fast predator, a cheetah nevertheless is one of the most vulnerable species amongst its kind. They suffer both from larger and smaller predators, as well as from human encroachment.

Using the techniques she learned with Elsa, Joy successfully reintroduced Pippa, a female cheetah, into the wild. Joy has dedicated two books to Pippa and her litter, first being The Spotted Sphinx, and the second being Pippa’s Challenge. Yet another success was waiting some years later, when Joy successfully worked on a reintroduction of an African leopard named Penny.

In her later years Joy was an activist, travelling around the world, making speeches and raising funds in order to protect the wildlife. Her life ended tragically shortly before her 70th birthday as she was murdered by a disgruntled⁸ laborer who was fired by Adamson not too long ago. Her ashes were scattered in Meru National Park over Elsa’s grave as an eternal testament⁹ to the fact that we all were born to be free.