masterwordsmith-unplugged

I love animals - dogs, hamsters, white mice, birds and even fish.

Right now, I am trying to come to terms with the fact that my beloved hamster, Mishy, will leave me one day. He is coping with a growth just behind his right cheek and my mornings and evenings (the times when I play with him) have been most difficult as I see him moving and playing with me in pain.

Some may say I am mad to feel so much for animals. Yea, I do. Not only for animals, but for people who matter to me. Some look down on me for I feel too much. It matters not; at least I have the capacity to feel. Some think I am mad when I tell them how much my hamster (including the departed ones) loves me and can recognize my voice, whistle or the range of sounds I make. It is terribly painful to love something or someone and then to lose that something or someone.

I used to wonder if anyone felt the way I do - whether I am weird to have this deep capacity to care, to feel, to cry....and if I am a weaker vessel because I have more emotions than others. Perhaps in the past I did not know how to handle the emotions but after all I have gone through, I can say I control my emotions and not the other way round.

So when I watched the following video(CONFIRMED TO BE TRUE BY SNOPES - CLICK HERE), I did not expect to react the way I did. But when I found out that they decided to let him return to the wild, I could only imagine the heartbreak and anguish that they had when they released him into the wild.

And me being human, forgot to consider how Christian the lion felt. Amazing. What were some of the thoughts that went through my mind? Simple. Could animals feel more than humans? You bet they do! Could they remember the goodness that people had breathed into their lives? Was that marred by a separation that went beyond their expectation? Christian must have felt abandoned by John Rendall and Ace Berg but that did not stop Christian the lion from expressing his love to them when he was reunited with them...a year later...and the subsequent reunions in the 14 year period when they visited him in Kenya. Did he blame them for 'abandoning' him? Nope.

It is 1.30a.m. now. I am still choked with so much emotion at the sight of how Christian is so exuberant in showing his unending joy at seeing John Rendall and Ace Berg again....And I only ask myself - has mankind become so alienated from himself that the capacity to give or even to accept love become so constricted/restrained that many think it is a sign of weakness to be expressive? Sad. Even pets and a lion can be unrestrained in their capacity to show love compared to the way some people are all out to attack or alienate others in different layers of society today.

So dear reader, may this video touch you and make you get in touch with your emotions...and more importantly, get in touch with someone ...Remember - John Rendell and Ace went back to see Christian over a period of 14 years until they finally lost touch!!! Gosh! FOURTEEN YEARS!!!


Today, Ace Bourke is a museum curator in Australia. John Rendall is a trustee of the George Adamson Wildlife Trust, an organization actively involved in preserving African wildlife. The organization, according to Rendall, is part of Christian's legacy. Rendall recommends the site www.WildlifeNow.com.

Full story can be read here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-452820/Christian-lion-lived-London-living-room.html

Read about the last meeting between the guys and Christian over here...at this link in Snopes.com

Ace Bourke is the Blonde in the Khaki shirt

*** As seen on THE VIEW, ITV NEWS, SKY NEWS, FOX TV, TODAY SHOW, BRAZILS TV RECORD CHANNEL, INDIA HINDI NEWS CHANNEL, AUSTRALIAN CHANNEL NINE NEWS, CHINAS BEIJING CCTV NEWS, BBC NEWS, ABC NEWS and CBC NEWS. ***

The orphaned baby lion cub is reunited with his keepers in africa a heart warming true story.
He travelled by Bentley, ate in fine London restaurants and spent his days lounging in a furniture shop. The story of Christian the pet lion - and his eventual release into the wild - is as moving as it is incredible.

The furniture shop was on the King's Road in London. It sold tables, wardrobes, chairs and desks - but anybody peering through its plate-glass window on a Sunday might have noticed something rather more unusual.

Amid all the pine and oak, stretched out languidly on a bench, there was a lion. And it wasn't stuffed.

"Christian used to lie beside me while I did the accounts at weekends," remembers Jennifer Mary Taylor, who worked there.

"And every so often, if I'd ignored him for too long, he'd sock me across the head with one of his great big paws.

"He was very loving and affectionate - he liked to stand and put his paws on your shoulders. But he was...", she pauses. "I mean, he was a lion. Does that sound silly?"

Christian the lion (named by someone with a Biblical sense of humour) arrived in Chelsea at a time when the King's Road - home to Mick Jagger - was the very heart of the Swinging Sixties.
For a year, the Big Cat was part of it all, cruising the streets in the back of a Bentley, popping in for lunch at Casserole, a local restaurant, even posing for a Biba fashion advert.

He eventually grew too big to be kept as a pet and was taken to Kenya, where he was rehabilitated into the wild by the 'Lion Man', George Adamson (whose wife wrote Born Free).

Now, his story is to be told in a new book, written by the Australian John Rendall who, along with his friend Ace Berg, bought Christian from Harrods in 1969.

So what possessed them to buy a lion cub in the first place?

"A friend had been to the 'exotic animals' department at Harrods and announced, rather grandly, that she wanted a camel," says Rendall.

"To which the manager very coolly replied: 'One hump or two, madam?'

"Ace and I thought this was the most sophisticated repartee we'd ever heard, so we went along to check it out - and there, in a small cage, was a gorgeous little lion cub. We were shocked. We looked at each other and said something's got to be done about that."

Harrods, it turned out, was also quite keen to be rid of Christian, who had escaped one night, sneaked into the neighbouring carpet department - then in the throes of a sale of goatskin rugs - and wreaked havoc.

The store, which had acquired the cub from Ilfracombe zoo, happily agreed to part with him for 250 guineas. So began Christian's year as an urban lion.

Today, it would be unthinkable for a shop to take such a cavalier attitude towards selling exotic animals (though Harrods did, at least, provide Ace and Rendall with diet sheets).

And it is hard to imagine either the animal rights lobby or any local council condoning a shop as a suitable habitat for a lion. But, back then, no one minded at all.

Christian was given his own living quarters (and a very large kitty-litter tray, which he used unfailingly) in the basement of the appropriately named Sophistocat furniture shop.

"He had a beautiful musky smell that was very distinct," says Rendall. "But he was clean."
The vicar of the Moravian Chapel nearby was approached to allow Christian the run of the graveyard, and every day he was taken there to roar around and play football.

Once, when he was brought along to a seaside picnic, he dipped his toes reluctantly in the water and intimated with a shudder that it was disagreeably cold. But he was eventually persuaded to swim in the English Channel.

By the way John Rendal and Ace Bourke both released a book in 1972 called A LION CALLED CHRISTIAN available at Amazon.