A Lion Called Christian by Anthony "Ace" Bourke and John Rendall is the true story of of the remarkable bond between two friends and an African lion. Courtesy of of Broadway Books, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, we present the entire first chapter of this remarkable book for free. If you enjoy what you read, please consider purchasing the book at the Animal Planet Store.
CHAPTER 1: A Lion with a Price Tag
No zoo is complete without lions. The small zoo at Ilfracombe in Devon on the south coast of England was no exception, and the lion and lioness were a particularly handsome pair. The lion had been bought from the Rotterdam Zoo in Holland, and the lioness had come from the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem. They had their first litter on August 12, 1969: four healthy cubs, one male and three females. Nine weeks later, with summer over and no more holiday crowds to attract, two female cubs were sent to an animal dealer and were subsequently bought by a circus. The remaining female and male were bought by Harrods, the Knightsbridge department store, and sent to London by train. The four cubs seemed destined, as their parents were, for a lifetime of frustration.
Three months before the cubs were born, we had left Australia for the first time, uncertain but optimistic. We had both graduated from university and had had a variety of jobs with no clear career path at that stage. We headed to London as many young Australians had before us, and well-known examples include the satirist Barry Humphries, journalist and broadcaster Clive James, academic and writer Germaine Greer, artists Sidney Nolan, Brett Whitely, and Martin Sharp, social commentator Richard Neville, and more recently, Kylie Minogue. Some Australians traveled overland through Asia and the Middle East, which is difficult if not impossible these days. We traveled independ ently for several months, but met up unexpectedly in London in late November 1969. Neither of us is a conscientious sightseer, but one day in an unusual burst of enthusiasm we visited, among other tourist destinations, the Tower of London. A suitable contrast, we decided, would be our first visit to Harrods. We were aware of Harrods' boast that they could provide anything at a price, of course. A friend had once inquired about a camel and been asked, "Would that be with one hump or two?" But Harrods seemed to have extended themselves beyond our imagination when, on wandering into their zoo on the second floor, we discovered two lion cubs in a small cage between the Siamese kittens and the old English sheepdogs. A lion cub with a price tag was not an easy thought to assimilate. The cubs were proving to be a successful drawing card for the Christmas shoppers, with the prospect of becoming the Christmas present for the person who already had everything.
We had not thought about lions before. Of course, we had seen them in zoos, but this was as far as our interest and knowledge extended. Neither of us had even read Joy Adamson's 1960 book
Born Free, the story of Elsa the lioness who had been found as a cub, raised and rehabilitated back into the wild by Joy and her husband George Adamson, who was a game warden with the Kenyan Wildlife Department. We sympathized with the cubs, for despite the efforts of the staff, they were incessantly disturbed by intrigued shoppers, yet we had to restrain the same urge within ourselves. Each person demanded a response.
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