Elsa: orphaned cub returned to wild
In 1956 George Adamson, a Kenyan game warden, shot a lioness that charged him and then found her three cubs; the two larger went to a Rotterdam zoo while the smallest, Elsa, was raised by George and his wife Joy. At about three years old, rather than send her to a zoo, they spent months teaching her to hunt and survive at a remote reserve before leaving her there, and she went on to mate with a wild lion and bear cubs of her own, becoming the first widely documented case of a hand-reared lion successfully released into the wild.