Riding a five-ton elephant, whom she called ‘my brother’, chilling with a cheetah or hugging a giant bullfrog as if it were a Teddy bear. Thechildhood of a French girl Tippi Degre sounds more like a newer version of Mowgli, rather than something real. A white child, she was born in Namibia to French wildlife photographer parents, and grew up in Africa. Tippi spent her whole childhood playing with wild animals including lion cubs, a mongoose, a snake, a cheetah, baby zebra, giraffes and crocodiles.
The little girl saw nothing unusual about her company: “I don’t have friends here. Because I never see children. So the animals are my friends,” she once said.
Tippi (born on 4 June,1990) is now 23 years old, and the only child to wildlife photographer parents Sylvie Robert and Alain Degre, who published her photos in a book called Tippi of Africa. “It was magical to be able to be free in this nature with this child. She was a very lucky little girl – she was born and raised until the age of 10 totally in the wild.” said Sylvie.
Tippi later moved with her parents to Madagascar and then to France, where she became a celebrity. A book of her adventures (Tippi of Africa, was published and translated in several languages. Bestselling novel of Tippi’s adventurous life in Namibia. She also set up a website, and returned to Africa to make six nature documentaries for the Discovery Channel.
In Paris (France), Tippi attended a local state school for the first two years, but was then homeschooled because she was found to have little in common with the other children in Paris. She is now studying cinema at la Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris.
