The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 205

them, with the result that three of them were mauled to death (two
others were trampled to death by his elephants). When he was dying
of cancer, Aspinall tried to induce his tigers to kill him too.
He believed that the human race was 'vermin' 26 and announced that
'Britain's population problem can be solved by beneficial genocide'. 27
He maintained that 'the concept of the sanctity of human life is the
most damaging that philosophy has ever propagated' 28 (his zoo-keeping
policy was, it seems, consistent with that belief). He professed himself a
supporter of Hitler's views on eugenics, 29 and described his third wife
as 'a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant
male and make his life agreeable'. 30 He worked with Mangosuthu
Buthelezi to undermine the African National Congress and forestall
majority rule in South Africa. With Lord Lucan (who later disappeared
after allegedly bludgeoning his children's nanny to death) and the finan-
cier Sir James Goldsmith, he discussed the possibility of launching a
military coup against Harold Wilson's Labour government. 31
Joy Adamson's topic Born Free , published in 1960, about bringing
up and then releasing a pet lioness in Kenya, was wildly successful.
The portrayal of her character and behaviour in the topic and the
Oscar-winning film that dramatized it was pure fiction. In reality she
possessed a strong suite of what might have been psychopathic traits.
She got what she wanted through a combination of manipulation and
volcanic eruptions of temper. While devoting great care and attention
to the lions, leopards and cheetahs she looked after, she appeared to
have few scruples about the way she treated people, especially her
African servants, and little understanding of the hurt she caused.
Her biographer, Caroline Cass, records that when a boy who
worked in her kitchen took too long to deliver her tea, Adamson
threw it in his face, scalding him. 32 When her cook spoilt the soup, she
dragged him before the magistrate, and demanded, unsuccessfully,
that he be beaten by the police. She forced another servant, who was
seriously injured with third-degree burns as a result of an accident, to
walk eight miles to the clinic for treatment, refusing to drive him as a
punishment for his carelessness.
Adamson's first public lectures on the world tour she began in
1961 were entitled 'Man: the inferior species'. She threatened to shoot
the keepers in Sydney zoo, after alleging that they were mistreating