Elsa the lioness
Elsa the lioness ( 28 January 195624 January 1961) was a female lion raised along with her sisters "Big One" and "Lustica" by game warden George Adamson and his wife Joy Adamson after they were orphaned at only a few days old. Though her two sisters eventually went to the Netherlands' Rotterdam Zoo, Elsa was trained by the Adamsons to survive on her own, and was eventually released into the wild. Her story is told in several books by the Adamsons, as well as the 1966 motion picture "Born Free". Life. Elsa and her sisters were orphaned on  February 1, 1956 after George Adamson was forced to kill their mother when she charged him, in defense of her three cubs. George only later realized why the lioness had acted so aggressively towards him. George and his wife Joy then adopted the lioness’s four-day-old cubs. While Elsa lived in many ways like a domesticated pet when she was small, Joy Adamson, whom Elsa trusted the most, considered her relationship with Elsa to be that of equals. Indeed, after sending the other two to a zoo, Joy was fiercely determined to give Elsa the education she needed  to hunt and live in the wild. Her efforts paid off, earning Elsa worldwide fame at the time, when her early life’s story was published in the book "Born Free". When Elsa was three years old, she brought three cubs of her own to show to the Adamsons, whom the Adamsons named "Jespah" (male), "Gopa" (male), and "Little Elsa" (female). The life of Elsa and her cubs is covered in the book "Living Free", published not long afterwards. Elsa died prematurely of a form of babesiosis, a tick-borne blood disease similar to malaria which often infects the cat  family. Elsa’s grave is in the Meru National Park. She died as local sentiment had begun to turn against Elsa and her cubs, forcing the Adamsons to consider moving them. Elsa’s death made her cubs much more averse to human contact, even with the Adamsons themselves, complicating what would be their eventual capture and release in the Serengeti. The fate of the cubs upon their release was uncertain, though George Adamson was able to find Little Elsa, healthy and in the company of two other unrelated lions, during 19 months of subsequent searching. This was the last time  that the Adamsons saw any of Elsa's cubs.