In 2008 a clip was posted on YouTube which became a worldwide sensation. The clip, known as the Christian the Lion reunion, showed an emotional reunion between two men and a lion. They had purchased the lion cub at Harrods in London, kept him as a pet, then rehomed him in Kenya on George Adamson's Kora Reserve. Key themes of the essays in Captured: the Animal within Culture are encapsulated in Christian's story: the implications of the physical and cultural capture of animals. As commodities trafficked for profit or spectacle, as subjects of scientific endeavour, the invisibility of animal capture and the suffering it invariably brings takes place in the context of a proliferation of representations of animals in all aspects of human culture. Leading scholars discuss films, novels, popular culture, performance and histories of animal capture and several of the essays provide compelling accounts of animal lives. [Publisher's abstract]
Graham Barwell addresses the following questions in this essay: 'how did the albatross acquire the significance it has today for Westerners?; what has been the relationship between its cultural significance and their behaviour towards it?; are the ways it has been captured in writing and visual media likely to affect people's behaviour?' (p. 85). The examples Barwell provides range from fifteenth century European explorers' account to contemporary novels; the one Australian text discussed is Ian Irvine's The Last Albatross.
