Tippi Degre is hanging upside down from a trapeze slung from the beams of the cramped Paris flat. She is known among other things for supervising the tigers in Fort Boyard, off the coast of France, which is the stage for a popular international game show. After moving to Paris, France with her parents, she returned to Africa to make six nature documentaries for the Discovery Channel. Tippi Degré (born 4 June 1990) is a French girl, who spent her childhood in Namibia among wild animals and tribespeople. It is like Mowgli's story, but Tippi's is true." She wants to become an ambassador for Namibia. Sylvie added: "Tippi believes she is African and she wants to get a Namibian passport. This summer Tippi passed her Baccalaureate and entered La Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris where she follows her past two years of cinema studies at the Lyceum. "Because I was at ease, because I liked it and because we had lived with the Meerkats in the Kalahari desert for six years before Tippi was born, I believed it was fantastic to have that to offer to a child compared to what I would be able to offer to a child living in a city for example. "For me it was incredible to think you offer all of this to a child," she says. Now aged 18 and having just started a degree in cinema at University in Paris, Tippi is facing a different jungle - the concrete kind.īut for Sylvie, her decision to bring up her child in the African wilderness was the correct choice - and she has no regrets. I had to take her away - I was not at ease." "Mufasa came to Tippi and he friendly brushed her with his long tail, like a cat would do, and she almost fell down. "The year after this photo we came back and we went to see him and he was huge. Sylvie said: "The photo with Tippi next to the young lion cub Mufasa sucking her thumb is wonderful. However, there were moments when Sylvie and Alain, who have since divorced, had to keep a special eye on their daughter. Sometimes they are tame or used to humans and so this is how Tippi was able to be so close with them." The farmers often keep orphan animals and raise them in their house. "But in the arid or semi desert regions of Southern Africa people have farms of 10 000 to 20 000 hectares. "Wild animals will either run away or attack you if they are either frightened, injured or need to protect their young. "You can't just meet any of these animals and act like this with them," explains Sylvie. However, despite the apparent ease and comfort with which they interact, Sylvie and Alain always put Tippi's safety first. Linda was so afraid of riding Tippi she didn't want to move." Her mother added: "Linda, an ostrich from one of the African farms we visited, was so nice that we couldn't even take a photo of Tippi riding her. In another picture, you see her with the caracal, she looks almost sad in this photo but she is confident."īut some animals were so taken with Tippi, that she almost became an extension of them. "She was a year and a half when they first me and it was a special time - just incredible. She would look into its eyes and speak to him. "She did not realise she was not the same size as Abu the elephant. Using her innocence and imagination, the young 'Mowgli' befriended one of the giants of the animal kingdom, Abu the African elephant. She was using her imagination to live in these different conditions." She believed the animals were her size and her friends. "She was in the mindset of these animals. "Tippi always said that everybody was gifted and this was her gift," explains Sylvie. From sitting on the back of an ostrich, lying peacefully with a young leopard or sitting on the trunk of an elephant, these amazing pictures show an unusual bond and tranquility between man and beast.
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