Call of the wild

Photo / Supplied

Youtube has thrown up some bizarre imagery in its time: Tom Cruise's Scientology rants, "evil" babies, piano-playing cats. They won't have much staying power. But a film clip first posted towards the end of 2007 is in another league altogether, accumulating more than 50 million hits and schmaltzy bloggers galore. Last year's most-visited YouTube clip is all the more remarkable because the low-tech footage is 40 years old.

Christian the Lion shows still photographs of an adorable lion cub, bought from Harrods, living with two hippies in London in 1969, playing ball in a nearby graveyard and going for drives in the back of their Mercedes sports car. The text explains that as the cub grew larger, they arranged for Christian's rehabilitation in 1970 in a sanctuary run by lion conservationist George Adamson in Kenya.

The two men - Australians Anthony "Ace" Bourke and John Rendall - returned a year later with a film crew, which is how the YouTube clip was able to reveal their dramatic reunion with near-fully grown and roaming free Christian. He comes over a hill, stares hard at the two men, then hurtles towards them, standing on his hind legs to wrap his front legs around their necks and lick their faces.

The popularity of the YouTube clip has been such that Bourke and Rendall have updated and revised the book they first wrote about Christian in 1970, hoping that the interest in his remarkable story will help raise funds to restore Adamson's sanctuary, Kora, which has fallen into disrepair since his murder by Somali poachers in 1989.

Rendall, the dark-haired man in the images, says on the phone from Sydney that he doesn't know who first posted the clip on YouTube. "People kept congratulating us, saying 'thank you for reminding us about Christian'. Well, neither of us has the computer skills to do it. We were delighted to see it but some of the facts were wrong so I tried to email the person who put it on. I never got a response so we have no idea who did that, but thank you to that person. It has created an opportunity for us to republish the book and also bring to people's attention the concerns of conservation."

Bourke, an arts curator specialising in Aboriginal work, says the clip, and now the new book, has made him "fall in love with Christian all over again, and the world has too". "John has kept in touch with the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust but I hadn't thought about Christian or discussed it for years and we never thought it would come back. I feel quite pleased, a little bit embarrassed by my hair and clothes, although I am quite bald now. What shines through is the extraordinary footage so it was amazing that it was captured on film and is striking such a chord with so many people. "It does break all the preconceptions about man and probably the most powerful animal predator. It shows real, unconditional love."

The two men, in their early 20s when they moved from Australia to London just in time to catch the tail-end of the "Swinging 60s", first saw Christian in the pet department of Harrods, sent there with his sister after being born at a small zoo in Ilfracombe in Devon. The likely fate of such animals for sale was life in a circus or zoo, but as soon as Bourke and Rendall locked eyes with the little cub they later named Christian, they were determined to start him on a better life.

"He went to the best store in the world for people who have everything," recalls Bourke. "He caught our eye because he was so attractive, so full of personality, he had charisma. His sister did not like being in a small cage, understandably, and Christian didn't either but he had a personality that could cope with that. He wasn't that fazed by people looking at him - he wanted to have fun so he caught our eye."

After a thorough interview by the Harrods buyer, Bourke and Rendall bought Christian for 250 guineas and installed him in the airy basement of the King's Rd furniture shop, Sophistocat, where they both lived and worked. He was 4 months old and weighed 13.5kg. By night the cub, which was toilet-trained, slept in his "den" or occasionally with one of the guys on their beds. By day he often roamed around the shop, hiding behind furniture, then leaping out to "tap" people's ankles.

"He used to rush around the basement playing," says Rendall. "He had his toys and his plastic buckets [which he wore on his head] and his mattress that he used to drag around. He was very vocal - he used to make wonderful grunts when he was pleased to see you. When he wanted to attract your attention he would make a sound like a grunt. We would bend down and he would rub his head against you. It's a wonderful sensation."

The book includes a photo of Christian leaning against a television set, an image which shows off the beauty of his eyes, described in the book as "round and rust-coloured". "His eyes were quite extraordinary," agrees Rendall. Bourke adds, "John has met more lions in the intervening 40 years than I have - some are not as attractive, they do not have great personalities, some are quite dumb, in fact, just like humans.

Christian was a very beautiful lion who created his own destiny by his attractiveness and force of personality." THE PAIR rarely used a collar and leash on Christian, except when they took him for a short drive up the road to the enclosed graveyard where the vicar had given them permission to exercise him. "We did have a leash for him but that was only for when we took him from the shop to the car, just in case he got a fright and ran off," explains Rendall.

"He was never trained to walk on a leash. People would ring up and say 'can we hire him for a film premiere' and things like that and we'd say no, because we didn't want to put him in a situation where he may have been in danger. Then people would ring and say 'come round and bring the lion'.

Well, we just didn't do that, it was too disruptive and his life was very safe and peaceful with a fixed routine." Fed on a mixture of Complan, Farex, milk, raw meat and bones - plus fillet steak brought in by a French chef - Christian grew beyond the point where Bourke and Rendall would have been able to control him if he turned on them. Mutual trust was crucial. "It was a case of not letting him know that he was stronger than us because we were always going to lose that battle," says Rendall. "We knew that right from the beginning and that was the route we took - not to ever have a stick to hit him as that would be asking for danger. We know that people in circuses and places like that, they have accidents because the moment the animals see that someone is unarmed, they'll take the chance.

We never let him realise that there was a point where, if he'd wanted to, we could not have controlled him." Eventually, Christian became bored. But where to go next with an 8-month-old cub weighing 59kg? Bourke and Rendall considered Longleat Safari Park in the south of England but came away disturbed by its commercial operations.

Christian's charisma once again provided the answer. The actor Bill Travers and his wife, actress Virginia McKenna, who had played George and Joy Adamson in the film Born Free, about a lioness called Elsa which was returned to the wild, came into the shop. They were looking for a desk but instead met a young lion running towards the two male shop assistants, who told them of their anxiety about his future. Shortly afterwards, Travers, who had devoted his life to producing documentaries about animal conservation since making Born Free, said he had the answer -

George Adamson in Kenya. It would be the first and possibly only time a lion from England would be rehabilitated into the wild of Africa. As negotiations with the Kenyan goverment stretched out and Adamson looked for a suitable area for a new sanctuary, Travers started filming Christian at Sophistocat for a documentary called The Lion at World's End, with footage of the lion playing in the graveyard now included in the YouTube clip. Then Christian, Bourke and Rendall moved to Travers' property in Leith Hill, south of London, where they had built a compound for the cat while awaiting his flight to Africa. August 12, 1970 was his first birthday. He flew out 10 days later.

George Adamson, a taciturn, no-nonsense man, writes in his foreword to the 1970 edition of A Lion called Christian, that he initially had little confidence in the two young "mods" accompanying Christian. "My first sight at Nairobi Airport of pink bell-bottomed trousers and flowing locks did nothing to dispel my misgivings ... but immediately, I sensed the bond of deep affection and trust between them and Christian."

After giving Christian two days' rest to recover from the flight, they set off on the long drive to Kora, Adamson amazed when the two young men let Christian jump in and out of the landrover for toilet breaks. Once at Kora, he was eventually to join two other lions, a young female and a huge 7-year-old lion, Boy, who had been one of the cubs filmed in Born Free. Christian's first encounters with Boy - at first separated by wire fencing - were frightening, recalls Rendall. "That was pretty heart-stopping. Christian hadn't seen another lion since he was 3 months old and this was 10 months later.

As far as he was concerned, he was a unique animal and the biggest one, so suddenly to see Boy who was enormous and very cross ... Boy was head of a pride and his job was to make sure young whippersnappers like Christian knew exactly their role. Christian had to acknowledge Boy's status from instinct. He wouldn't have seen that process, as a cub in the wild would have. Thank God he got it right, but even so. There's a photo in the book of Boy as he charges against the wire. We had a week of that, of them in separate compounds, and every time Christian crept forward, Boy would charge the wire and roar at him.

"After a week, George said, 'Right, I am confident he's not going to kill him and Christian will respond correctly, but we have to do it out in the open.' "He took Boy for a walk then we took Christian out and left him on the rock and we had to step back. Then George brought Boy back and Boy just came down and beat Christian up.

Christian rolled over, baring his stomach. There was a bit of a scratch but he was humiliated by this enormous lion and that went on for some weeks, every day, but it got less and less and then they became totally inseparable." (Adamson was devastated when he later had to shoot Boy when he attacked and killed one of his staff who had wandered outside the compound.) Bourke and Rendall had to return to London, confident that Christian's rehabilitation was going well, then they returned a year later for "the reunion".

By that stage, Adamson had taught Christian to be wary of humans, for his own protection, as he did with all lions that came into his care. The only person he still had any contact with was Adamson himself. "On the day, George was confident Christian would remember us because his own lions remembered him years later," recalls Rendall, "but he said he had never seen such an exuberant greeting.

We had to wait a bit till Christian turned up, then he came over the hill with George. His ears go up and he looks, then you see him start to walk slowly down, looking and looking. We recognised his body language - at no time was it aggressive, it was like, 'What's going on and who is it? Is it them? Is it them?' Then, bang, he recognised us and started to run. "How he didn't knock us over, I don't know, he was going at a fair whack by the time he reached us, he was in such a state of over-excitement.

Even George had a tear in his eye. It was a very emotive moment and brilliant that it could be filmed. He was making such a noise, like a mewing, moaning, groaning grunts, lovely happy groans." The two men returned once more after another year and again got some footage of a slightly more aloof reunion in which, Rendall believes, Christian had an "I am very grown up" attitude. The last sighting of Christian was by Adamson in 1973, when Christian was 4 years old and estimated at 227kg, "possibly the biggest lion in Kenya", according to the conservationist. He headed across the Tana River towards the Meru National Park and was never seen again - until the YouTube clips emerged, then were played on American TV on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, creating a spike of hits.

This month, Bourke and Rendall have been in the United States to appear on Oprah Winfrey's show in Chicago, then to New York where they were guests on The Today Show, Entertainment Tonight, Dateline NBC and The View. Rendall emailed to say they were also speaking at the Museum of Natural History. But why are so many people still fascinated by Christian's story?

"I think the story resonates even more now because the world is a more stressful and scary place and we've had the financial meltdown, so it's a very feelgood story at a time when people really need it," says Bourke. "We feel blessed by the opportunity to put the focus on wildlife conservation and I keep thinking, 'Why has this happened?' I do think it's a bit of a cry for Africa, for people who have been failed by their leaders in the colonial then the post-colonial era. They are doing it so hard so how can we expect them to look after animals and their shrinking habitat? There are two-thirds fewer lions than in Christian's time, which is a terrifying statistic.

"I think the other thing it's a cry for is about the fragility of the environment and global warming - it is a very contemporary message and all inter-related." Adds Rendall, "If people take an interest it would be a wonderful further legacy of Christian. We are very keen to support the trust and we have started some funding by drilling a new well for the nearest village and helping with some school buildings for children because it is education that is going to save the game.

"If we can get this message down to the children, say this is your future, these animals, because no one is going to go to Kora, no one will spend money in the local community, if there are no animals there, and that goes for the whole food chain."

* A Lion Called Christian (Random House $39.99) is released on April 3. A children's picture book version, Christian the Lion: A Retelling (Random House $18.99) is released on May 1. See www.georgeadamson.org for information about the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust.