Safari tourism will pay more and create more jobs than poaching and the eventual extinction of the animals. The remainder of the book is devoted to how Mark and Delia worked to rid the park of poachers and educate the surrounding villages in conservation and prove to them that they can make more money and live better lives if the animals are allowed to live.

After months and years of fighting to stay, they finally decided to move on and settled in Zambia in a national park where elephants (and other wild animals) were being poached and slaughtered by the thousands. It is never really made clear to the reader or to Mark and Delia Owens why they were expelled but they assumed it was because they were exposing non-environmental practices that were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of wild animals. The book begins as the Owenses are expelled from Botswana and the Kalahari, their original project in Africa. It was educational, if heartbreaking, and really immersed me in North Lunagwa National Park in Zambia. It is a memoir of a magical place and time that can never be recaptured.I liked this book as I was reading it although I knew it was dated having been published in 1992. It is the rearing of this young king, and the hilarious endeavours to teach him to become a 'real' lion who could survive with his own kind in the wild, that lie at the heart of this endearing memoir. Reared on a cocktail of love and bottles of fat-enriched milk, Leo soon became an affectionate, rambunctious and adored member of the fmaily. Yet nothing prepared the Krugers for their greatest adventure of all, the raising of an orphaned prince, a lion cub who, when they found him, was only a few days old and on the verge of death. And one terrible day, a lion attacked Kobus in the bush and nearly killed him. They soon became accustomed to living with the unexpected: the sneaky hyenas who stole blankets and cooking pots, the sinister-looking pythons that slithered into the house, and the usually placid elephants who grew foul-tempered in the violent heat of the summer. But as the Krugers settled in, they discovered that not all was peace and harmony. Kobie recounts their enchanting adventures and extraordinary experiences in this vast reserve - a place where, bathed in golden sunlight, hippos basked in the glittering waters of the Letaba River, storks and herons perched along the shoreline, and fruit bats hung in the sausage trees. Yet, for Kobie and her family, the seventeen years spent in this spectacularly beautiful park proved to be the most magical - and occasionally the most hair-raising - of their lives.

When Kobie Kruger, her game-ranger husband and their three young daughters moved to one of the most isolated corners of the world - a remote ranger station in the Mahlangeni region of South Africa's vast Kruger National Park - she might have worried that she would become engulfed with loneliness and boredom.

The wilderness family by kobie kruger