The Lion Cub from Harrods: Perhaps our favorite animal-human story of all time is that of Christian the lion, bought in 1969 from Harrods (because, in 1960s London, you could apparently buy anything from Harrods). Realizing after a year that the UK was really no place for a growing young lion, his owners asked a conservationist to reintegrate Christian into the wild, and they took him to Kenya. Some two years after Christian’s successful reintroduction into the wild, after he had become the head of a new lion pride, his former owners went to visit him, steeling themselves for rejection, indifference, or in the worst-case scenario, an attack. Their reunion is captured on grainy 1970s documentary footage, and it’s spine-tingling. The full story of Christian the lion is told in the documentary The Lion Cub from Harrods, or you can watch the final reunion here.

PSA- Should you ever find yourself in the middle of a Kenyan national park with a lion barrelling towards you, we do not recommend wrapping said lion in a bear hug.