The various stuffed, retrieved, story-fied and cartooned animals in my young life were supplemented by all the beasts of the forest, jungle and desert. Every day, beginning in my pram, when it wasn’t pouring with rain, my mother took me to the nearby London Zoo in Regent’s Park to pass the time for me and her. On Sunday mornings I went there with my father when the zoo was closed, except to members, and the keepers were on hand to take us round to the back of the cages and wrap a snake around my neck. The zoo, that particular zoo, its animals and its topography, was embedded in my brain the way that language is, growing in me as I grew with it. And it remains there vividly. It is a particularly tangled language because what I learned at the zoo was a language that was not of the animals (how could it be?), but a version of my own human kind, one structured by reminiscence of colonialism and fantasy, and the fact that they, the creatures, were all in the wrong place, often in the wrong way, purely, it seemed, for my entertainment and interest. It’s not without relevance that the alternative to the zoo on rainy days was often Selfridges, the department store: another place we could spend most of the day, wander around, look, imagine and wonder at objects from all over the world. Both were city spectacles for a mother with a small child. Alternate days out.
The zoo back then was a terrible place for the animals, especially the wilderness ones. The lions and tigers were housed in Victorian iron cages with thick black bars which bulged pregnantly at the front, giving the viewer the thrilling sense that the beast inside was getting closer as it prowled the perimeter of its world. Inside the Lion House, at the back, the cages, which the animals entered through a lockable door at feeding time, at night and if it was wet, were plain, flat-fronted and separated each from the other by institutional brick. As if to enhance both the reality of post-war austerity and the sense of passive spectacle, there was a sign on a wall between the cages that said not ‘Beware of the Dangerous Lions’, but ‘Beware of Pickpockets’. The indoor lion and tiger cages were a series of proscenium stages, enclosed in a long, drab theatre with a high arched roof. Directly opposite the bars of the cages were rows of raked wooden benches where people sat and stared at the pacing beasts, as both waited expectantly for feeding time. I sat there being passed sandwiches by my mother and watched great hunks of red meat being poked through the bars by the keepers of the lions and tigers. The animals were let into the indoor enclosure beforehand and knew that they were about to be fed. They roamed up and down purposefully, not at their usual languid rate of creatures that knew they were getting nowhere, nor did they sprawl drearily on the concrete floor as they did outside. With feeding time on them, they moved faster, restlessly (what’s keeping lunch?), so you could see the muscles in their thighs working. They rumbled in their throats, a sound that threatened to become a roar, and which rose and echoed around the high-beamed ceiling before drifting down over the audience for them to make of the echo whatever threat and excitement they could. When the bloody chunk of beef was finally pushed through the bars at the end of huge toasting forks (a little teasing went on by keepers who knew that they were showmen as much as caretakers, and knew, too, that even lions want their lunch to be interesting), the great cats, each in their own cage, hunkered down to it, their necks sunk between their shoulder blades, high and sharp, their teeth tearing at the flesh, almost making love to it, immobilised with their outspread claws.
Parents made jokes to their children about table manners, or encouraged the imagination with tales of faraway human beings torn apart in the jungle (lions and tigers always stalked in jungles rather than roamed over grasslands) by these mangy man-eaters. And there was always the story to be recited or remembered from home of the terrible fate of Albert Ramsbottom, told in a broad Lancashire accent on scratchy 78 records by Stanley Holloway. Albert met his end at Blackpool, but I could only envisage the sorry tale happening in front of me in the lion house at London Zoo.
Jungles, cautionary tales, lessons in table manners and broad comedy were the essential ingredients of a visit to the lion house, along with the smell of animal that lingered on the damp cold concrete. I remember most powerfully, not the cats themselves, but that smell and the glossy black bars of their cages. These days the big cats are housed in what is called a ‘Pavilion’; there is a moat, landscaping and open air, and round the other side, at the back, thick glass, but those cages and bars they replaced, ornately coming together into a dome at the top, serried and regular at the front, are my real recollection of the lions and tigers of the London Zoo. They were sinister, and teased the observer with the threat of what lay behind such solid, wrought protection. If they were to get out … they said very clearly, offering a little secure mayhem. The spaces between each bar were glimpses of the wild: an alternation of captivity and freedom, of safe watching and imminent danger. Possibly, a small child might have slipped through the bars and certainly the front leg of a lion could easily get through and swipe you to death with those deadly claws. That was why there were additional railings in front of the cages. Even the black bars were not quite enough security against the lords of the jungle. I think the actual lions and tigers were poor, slow, captive creatures, without expectation or curiosity, demented with boredom, lack of proper company and range, but the bars were fierce and deadly and made whatever paced behind them into monstrous threats to life and limb, as least for the spectators.
The lion cages became the shame of London Zoo when public opinion finally got round to empathising with the miserable lot of captive animals rather than simply laughing at their amusing (though often, in reality, psychotic) antics. In those days elephants danced in skirts, dogs jumped through hoops of fire and lions sat up and begged at the crack of a whip in circuses all over the country, and hardly anyone blinked an eye, or mentioned dignity or cruelty. In the zoos, polar bears and other wild creatures developed obsessive-compulsive behaviours, biting at their fur and feathers, walking to and fro in mad bursts and nodding their heads repetitively, and for all most people knew that was just how animals behaved. Eventually, the concrete and black iron lion cages came to represent suffering rather than a lingering imperialist show of the power to incarcerate creatures from all parts of the world for the entertainment of those who waited at home for the benefits. The 1950s, when I was growing up, was a last gasp of insouciance, before consciences slowly began to prick, until gradually, over the next two or three decades, different values were at least embedded in the statute books and in how people were allowed to treat and be amused by non-human animals. There must have been pity and anger from some people, but no one mentioned it to me, and I wasn’t so sensitive a child as to see it for myself rather than take my pleasure in watching the exotic. At any rate, the zoos and the circuses slid into a crisis, and by the turn of the twenty-first century were obliged to change their ways and pay lip-service to a consideration of animal welfare beyond the provision of food and a roof. Undoubtedly the keepers held their charges in great affection, knew their needs and tried to enhance their lives as much as they could. But the concrete zoo remained small and concrete and remote from the lives that many of the animals would have led when they were captured, or the only kind of existence those born in it could or would ever know. And there were very few constraints about the kind of entertainment and use we thought we were entitled to get out of animals.
Back then, in my childhood, I watched the chimpanzees’ tea party – held on a small grassy patch every day, if it wasn’t raining, at 3 p.m. A table and chairs, tea, sandwiches and the collusion of the keepers to enchant us children at the chaos which ensued as the chimps grappled with implements like teapots, teacups and napkins, for which they had no use or need, and made an unholy mess, spilling milk, taking the insides out of the sandwiches, diving face first into the sugar bowl and being told off in pantomime finger-wags by their straight men, the keepers. It was carnival, a delicious topsy-turvy of civilised manners. The children shrieked with pleasure at the naughtiness that they themselves had to keep in check. Then it was time for an elephant or a camel ride. The elephant would be led from its house to the strip of tarmac it was to pace up and down for an hour or so, carrying adults and children on its back in a contraption that held us seated on either side of its back, though I think you faced front on the camel. Watching the elephant and camel being led along the paths humans walked was the most exciting thing, that and the fact that you had to climb the wooden steps to get on to the animal. Elephant and camel waited with immense patience while they were loaded up and then, led on a leash by a keeper, they walked, swaying (each in a different way), along the path, turned around and walked back to the wooden steps where we got off. Uneventful, but somewhat dream-inducing. The rides were an even clearer imperial moment than the caged lions provided, a brief taste of a glorious past when white men learned the ways of those they colonised and used them for leisure purposes: hunting tigers or entertaining the children back home. Perhaps the elephant and the camel were pleased enough at this break in the monotony of their day. I can’t say. As far as I know they never reared up or bolted or threatened the squealing humans who rode on their backs. But then animals are almost certainly nicer than people.
It didn’t feel political either, to me, or to my mother or father, neither of whom, being just a first generation away from the shtetl, had fantasies of empire. It was simply uncomplicated, enjoyable fun. I was deliriously happy at the zoo and watching the animals was among my most treasured pastimes. I counted Guy the Gorilla a friend. I stood in front of his cage every day and looked into his eyes which looked back at me when I managed to catch his attention. And because Guy looked back, I imagined that we knew each other well. In reality, the eyes were pretty blank, looking but not taking an interest in the sameness he was offered day after day. Perhaps this is how Bunty looks at me, not looking at all, but just gazing in a quite different way. Guy had arrived at the zoo four months after I was born, having been captured in the French Cameroon as an infant – his mother presumably having been killed. He went first to Paris Zoo and was then traded to the London Zoo for a tiger. He lived alone in his barred quarters for twenty-five years, until a female, Lomi, was found for him, though they never mated. The current website for the zoo tells how Guy would ‘gently’ scoop up sparrows that landed in his cage and peer at them before letting them go. He was a gentle creature, but then gorillas are. He was also grossly under-stimulated. Mostly he sat with his legs splayed and his arms by his side or masturbating in a desultory fashion, and stared out through the bars at the people who stared back at him. He seemed to me old and wise, although in fact he was incarcerated and most likely depressed. That stare I most recognise as despair, which I’ve seen in the eyes of humans, but I suppose I’m being anthropomorphic. I thought we were friends. I loved him, and told him things.
The zoo, as I remember it, before it was reconstructed as a more acceptable breeding and educational environment rather than pure spectacle, was at one with Britain of the 1950s. It’s difficult to reconstitute it as I felt it then, so many layers of thought and knowledge having been added, but the sense that it was the colour of concrete, dank and drab is impossible to shake off. I loved the animals and felt completely familiar and at home in the zoo, but looking back it was a cheerless place, for all that it was built in the pretty green space of Regent’s Park. So was London cheerless, still dotted with bombsites and almost palpably convalescent from the recent war we heard so much about from our families. The zoo was uniformly grey. You walked around a network of tarmacked paths, through the tunnel under a canal bridge, and stopped at cages made of concrete and iron and indoor animal houses of brick with concrete floors. It was practical for keeping the animals clean, but no colour was permitted; nothing, as I recall, was painted. There was straw and rubber tyres for the monkeys and apes to play with, and a concrete pool for the seals to splash in, some areas of grass here and there, a concrete trench around the elephants and rhinoceros to keep them in and us out, and some fake wall paintings of mammoths and bison in the tunnel under the canal. But everything, in my recollection, was as grey as the rest of the world I inhabited. Even the brilliantly coloured parrots and cockatoos were kept in a sort of shed that seemed to do its utmost to damp down their glory. Actually, there were contemporary architectural masterpieces in the zoo: the circular, white-painted concrete and black bars of the gorilla house and the reinforced concrete, grade-one listed, swirling walkways of the penguin pool were both designed by Berthold Lubetkin in the 1930s and are still considered modernist masterpieces. The director of the London Zoo in the 1950s, George Cansdale, resisted the moves to have both buildings listed as National Trust treasures because, fine design though they were, he didn’t think they paid enough attention to the needs of the animals they housed. He was overridden: human aesthetics trumped their functional failings. In fairness, the penguin house, at least, does look as if it is a stylised attempt to consider the natural environment of the penguins, who have to struggle up and down its walkways just as they have to on Antarctic glaciers. The snow would be softer, but perhaps the concrete is less cold on their feet. Who knows if the penguins consider this a good exchange?
In addition to all the caged and captive animals I delighted in gazing at, in what was my real life if not theirs, there were, increasingly, animals on television. In fact, I only specifically remember one animal from my childhood TV watching – I’m not counting Silver, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Tonto who were, after all, actors. What I actually recall with the special soft-focus clarity reserved for the distant past are the human beings who presented the animals. Some of these were zoo-keepers. Cansdale, the same man who disapproved of listing the beautiful but functionally dubious penguin pool, often brought small or baby animals from the zoo into the studio on various programmes to show to us ‘boys and girls’ who turned on the black-and-white TV at teatime. He was moustached, neatly rounded and avuncular, a kindly, smiling sort of man who spoke in received pronunciation directly to us and to the animals he introduced while holding them in his arms. He even chuckled. People sometimes did then. It appears he was exactly as he seemed: married for fifty-two years to the same woman, a regular at his local parish church and a man of quiet but insistent principle, who took the children of his village to accompany him to the studio, two by two, but in strict turn.
He was not popular at the zoo, the administration of which has often been seen as a microcosm of the times* – and at that time it represented the harsh, needy period that people were suffering through after the war. The humans at the zoo employed some of the same solutions the rest of the country had found to alleviate the effects of wartime and post-war austerity. When Cansdale took over as director he discovered that the ticket collectors were pocketing about 10 per cent of the entry fees, and keepers regarded it as their right to take home the best cuts of meat and quality fruit and vegetables to their families rather than feed them to the animals. Turning a blind eye was endemic and institutional. Cansdale was deeply resented when he put a stop to it. One night, working late, he went into the reptile house and when he turned on the light, discovered that the floor was crawling with cockroaches. He was very surprised when the keepers strongly resisted his order to have the place de-infested. It turned out that they were actually selling cockroaches for sixpence each. Biddy Baxter, who wrote his obituary in 1993 for the Independent, doesn’t say who was buying them or for what purpose: collectors, schoolboys, mad scientists, beetle aficionados, food manufacturers? Cansdale was got rid of in 1953 – the trustees abolished his post rather than risk the scandal of an outright sacking. Not only was he unpopular at the zoo but he was disapproved of by academic zoologists who thought that showing children animals on television in his amiable sort of way was too populist.
Cansdale stood behind a table and held on to his wriggling charges as best he could, speaking to camera about them and why they looked and behaved as they did, how they differed according to their needs and niches, at least conveying to us that all of the creatures came from and were adapted to somewhere other than a zoo, that they were representatives of real lives lived away from cages. We learned ways of looking and thinking about animals we never would have from walking around the tarmacked paths. And he laughed when they bit him. But there was no suggestion that the animals he showed us shouldn’t be in a zoo. How else could we see them and become educated and enthusiastic about them? If you didn’t live in the country and spend your time peering into ponds and collecting beetles, George Cansdale offered a knowledgeable and affectionate glimpse of the Other, even if it was painted by the exoticism and incarceration of the zoo.
In the late 1950s, Desmond Morris, a zoologist employed at Regent’s Park, who was to turn up later in another guise, continued Cansdale’s elementary introduction to animal anatomy and behaviour with Zoo Time, which was broadcast from the grounds of the zoo itself. He had that one particular animal I remember from those days on television, as most of us who watched it must: Congo, the chimpanzee, appeared as Morris’s sidekick and was given artist’s materials to paint abstract pictures that were admired, so it was said, by Picasso, or proof to those who abhorred ‘modern’ art, that any chimp could paint as well as Picasso. Congo was employed to give us a close-up view of an animal that was profoundly connected to us human children. It was an early, gentle lesson in basic evolutionary theory. Morris treated him like a child-friend, told him off when he was naughty but laughed, too, and showed us how similar Congo was to us, as well as his limitations in human terms. The question of how much like us Congo was, and why that should be, was always hovering over the jocularity. They were educational and they were cosy, those programmes, but they nevertheless featured captive animals for our human edification. Though we were reminded that there was also a ‘natural’ habitat for these creatures, we saw animals in the charge of humans and, again, there was no suggestion that there was any problem with that, any more than that we were in the charge of adults. It’s very difficult to shift that idea of evolution as analogous to a child growing to adulthood – as in less to more, progress, better and better. It was clear, however, that while they were in charge of the animals, both Cansdale and Morris had respect and affection for them, and that was an important impression to give to developing minds.
I was, even at the time, not as comfortable with a programme that started in 1960 called Animal Magic. It probably thought of itself as educational, but disguised it with a fictional narrative that starred Johnny Morris, well known as a children’s storyteller on the radio. Morris played a downtrodden fictional zoo-keeper who was filmed talking and play-acting at the animals in the cages who were given funny and ‘appropriate’ voices to respond with by Morris when he was back editing in the studio. The animals became comic people, talking in stereotyped posh or cockney accents, with human, not animal concerns. They were like the cartoon creatures who were given animal features while behaving not like themselves but like us – trapped, as it were, inside their inadequate bodies (as, of course, we children were). I didn’t like the programme; it wasn’t interesting. There was something quite wrong about it, though I couldn’t have properly defined it. I wanted real animals, and someone authoritative telling me about them. Of course, I was probably too old in 1960 at thirteen, to be much amused, but I can’t say that I was morally or scientifically outraged so much as feeling in some way cheated. Johnny Morris is quoted later as having similar thoughts about the programme: ‘Some hated it because it was anthropomorphic. And anthropomorphism is one of the deadly sins. To make animals appear as though they were talking was totally and absolutely unscientific. Not only that, but it was a cheap and facile way to entertain boys and girls. To indulge in such worthless underhand tricks week after week was a disgrace.’
In the mid-1950s a new kind of programme about animals appeared on television. The words ‘wild’ and ‘wildlife’ began to be used, where they couldn’t have been before in the zoo-bound, studio-bound programmes. The new words came with investigations using portable cameras to find, track and observe animals where they actually lived. It was a substantial intellectual shift in the idea of educational entertainment. Previously, field studies were for professionals: people went to where the animals were, either as hunters to shoot them or scientists to observe them, after which they mounted heads on their walls or wrote their findings up for professional journals, but no one had thought to include the general public in the dissemination of the knowledge gained, let alone the investigations themselves. New film technology, lightweight cameras and sound equipment were certainly initially responsible – we can do it so let’s do it – but once it was possible and actually happening on television screens, a real change of consciousness gradually began to take place.
In the cinema there were the Disney wildlife films, but they were not so very far from Johnny Morris’s human impositions on the natural world. They were called True Life Adventures, and although they were neither true, nor even sometimes depictions of life, they were adventures in the sense that the film-makers were adventurous with reality. The Disney movies felt ersatz even while watching them: that over-scripted voice-over and what we saw on the screen always meshed so neatly, not a moment’s hesitation, no search, no doubt. At least there was a sense with Cansdale and Desmond Morris that the animals might do something unexpected because they were animals. In the Disney films, everything happened exactly as it was supposed to – according to the human script. No chance, as happened on TV sometimes (if you were lucky) of anyone being bitten or a baby elephant taking a pee in the wrong place. Even when the films weren’t downright invention, the animals were as captive in the lens of the camera as the lions pacing in their cages at the zoo. The new television programmes were different partly, and strangely, because they weren’t in the glorious, glossy Technicolor of Disney, and because we watched them at home, eating supper. They were domestic and although they were, of course, edited, the rough edges and accidents were often left in, unlike Disney’s remote, superior productions. Jungles and grasslands may have entered our understanding as being entirely in shades of grey, but oddly, now that everything we see on the television is in enhanced colour, they never felt less real for it.
To begin with, they were husband-and-wife affairs, a strange fact that greatly enhanced the programmes for the suburban, domestic audience, making the adventure a little less remote, if a husband and wife could do it together. Hans and Lotte Hass were uncannily similar to Armand and Michaela Denis: a stolid, serious and knowledgeable, though besotted, middle-aged man was accompanied by a glamorous, brave, adventurous and younger blond wife who ‘humanised’ the jungle or the sea, and the zoology. The difference between the two couples was that Hans and Lotte were underwater, while Armand and Michaela tramped over the earth. This gave Lotte the advantage of being beautiful in a wetsuit, but Michaela was dedicated to elegance and renewed her lipstick (clearly bright red even in black and white) frequently when preparing to meet the last white rhino in existence or capture an orphaned baby elephant. The women were followers, always, but kept up, while the men admired the gumption of their women, and so did we. The idea was that they could have sat at home and waited for their man to return from his investigations of the grubby and dangerous world, but they followed him gamely, learning the necessary skills while at the same time providing a ladylike or womanly take on what they were seeing. Apart from the undoubted gender stereotyping, it was a format that allowed a conversation to go on between husband and wife, which enhanced the sense that we were looking in on someone’s passion. They were excited at coming across an unknown fish or a member of a vanishing species, to each other, not to us. The voice-over (of Hans and Armand, with interpolations by the wives) was accompanied by the gesticulations and excited glances on screen (the film was usually silent with jungle sounds edited in) between the stalking land-based couple, and the breathless eye contact underwater. It was intimate and gave a sense of real time, of being there and of being astonished. But it was also domestic. The couples would sometimes gently disagree or make mild fun of each other as if they were discussing the morning’s news or each other’s little ways, rather than some exotic creature far away or deep down. It kept the wild and the tame in a balanced relationship. And from time to time, they spoke to us directly from the studio, all dressed up for the telly. A clip on the BBC Wildlife website from 1954 shows Armand and Michaela at the beginning of their second series. He is in a suit, with slicked-back but slightly wayward hair and round owlish glasses – a scientist scrubbed up, plump, almost comically dowdy – while Michaela sits beside him wearing an unequivocal evening dress (perhaps of her own design, as she’d been a dress designer before her marriage to Armand), possibly silk shantung, low-cut and standing a little proud at the shoulders with a tight bodice, dangly earrings and fiercely coiffed blond hair. They both sit with their hands neatly in their laps and Michaela looks at Armand, smiling toothily (it was her only physical flaw – no orthodontistry back in 1954) while he speaks in a strong, continental accent:
This is wonderful, to be back here in the television studios of the BBC … It has been a pleasant surprise, pleasant beyond any expectation to find how many friends we’ve made … We’ve been flooded with many letters of welcome and displays of affection. I want to thank you all for it, but Michaela can do it much more prettily than I can.
The camera pans to Michaela, who shows even more teeth. ‘Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. I’m trying to answer all the letters, and I’m doing it a little each day.’1
There isn’t the slightest whiff of insincerity, even watching now; they are moistly grateful and genuinely delighted, it seems, to have been taken to the hearts of the British television public. It looks naive and so unpolished compared to the shiny professional gushing with which twenty-first-century presenters thank their audiences for watching and keeping their viewing figures and salaries up. Seeing Armand and Michaela in ‘real’ clothes, dolled up, is a kind of present to their audience. We were so used to seeing them in khaki safari suits, though hers fitted very much better than his, and she wore her shorts to considerably more effect. But they are awkward here in proper outfits for television, in a formal setting, like the visual oddness of someone who suddenly takes off the spectacles they ordinarily wear, and are all the more vulnerable and trustworthy for that. The clothes are very different, but their niceness and mutuality is just the same as when we see them creeping through the bush or signalling to each other.
Of course, they do interfere in the wild and capture the baby elephant, remarking, as a makeshift cage is put together to contain it, on the wonderful ability of their native assistants to find whatever materials are needed from what is available in the bush. They were white, Western, middle-class, of their time. And so were the children who watched – I can’t recall minding about or questioning the senior, educational role of the men of each couple, and inasmuch as I daydreamed of being part of the safari, I imagined taking his role rather than hers, without any sense of incongruity. The animal world was still unquestionably to be managed by humans, but aside from sentimental captures, these humans at least tried to keep their presence to a minimum, not only to get their pictures, but because the pictures they wanted required the animals to be wild and in the wild. There was an implicit and growing understanding that animals could only really be seen for what they were in their natural habitat.
It was going to become increasingly clear that observation of ‘the wild’ or anything else is a tricky thing (the physicists had already discovered this), and that what we see is never natural, by the very fact of our seeing it. This is also the question of what we see being always conditioned by what we think. In some sense we can’t see animals at all, not even if they are in the wild and we conceal ourselves, because the voice-over – on screen, but most vitally in our heads – will always be there, shaping the shards, the fleeting images of the whole life of a creature, into a complete picture of our own, based on our partial and biased knowledge and understanding. We can’t know what we don’t know, which is the real life of animals from the point of view of animals. Armand and Michaela creep through the forest and come across a sighting, a rhino standing still, and immediately we are told what it is the animal is doing. It is standing still. Listening. Listening out, probably, for the human footsteps, or scenting wrongness on the air, they tell us. If we tried this with people we would know how flawed our view and understanding was likely to be. But of course, we have tried this with people, and actually haven’t had a clue about our flawed understanding, causing all sorts of misunderstandings and catastrophes, and it doesn’t stop us from doing it, at each stage knowing a little more, but still not knowing what we don’t know because like all animals we are curious, we want to look and to suppose that by looking we can see and therefore know. Perhaps, if we’d been offered still photographs, or even Dürer drawings of animals, instead of moving pictures and a narrative, we might have gazed on them and learned something without making too many assumptions about the subject of the pictures themselves, but the fact that you could have a camera and take it to faraway places and point it at rare creatures living their lives was irresistible, and impossible not to conceive of as new and better knowledge. On our behalf, Armand and Michaela stalked and Hans and Lotte swam, and brought me, a post-domestic child, as close as I could be got to the mystery of the Other living its life. Considerably closer, perhaps, than watching animals pace in concrete cages with signs warning ‘Beware of Pickpockets’.
A series called Zoo Quest began in 1954 hosted by an achingly young David Attenborough, who had the bright televisual idea of straddling the separate strands of the BBC’s nature offerings: the zoo and the wild. It was a decidedly uncomfortable position, as we would see it today. Each series centred on a filmed safari to a distant, exotic country to find and capture a particular rare animal for the London Zoo. To Sierra Leone for snakes; to Borneo to fetch a komodo dragon – of which the Zoo Quest camera caught the first-ever sighting on television. During the search, the camera took in and examined the local habitat, the other animals and the people living in the area, so just as the winds of change had started blowing we were presented with a wildlife programme which mimicked an imperialist habit going back centuries, where one of the locals (a non-human animal at this point in British history) from a distant land was taken out of the wild and brought, captive, to live as part of a collection for study and amusement back at home.
Each programme began in the studio, where David Attenborough, as enthusiastic as now and genuinely boyish then, in his first natural-history job, described the quest and how it was going, before returning us to the film of the adventure and speaking the voice-over. In the final episode of each series we were shown the captive animal live in the studio, in a cage or enclosure, around which a panel of experts discussed it. In retrospect, as dismal a concept of engagement of the natural world as I can imagine, but then it was exciting and morally untroubling to most people. A travelogue, a wildlife film, an adventure whose goal was always in doubt, and at last, the proof of the pudding, a living, breathing creature that we had seen being looked for, eventually spotted, filmed and captured in its natural habitat, the mysterious black-and-white jungle, now pacing and snarling in a cage, right there, live in the brightly lit television studio down the road, as it were, at Alexandra Palace, while you sat on the floor at home eating your fish-paste or Marmite sandwich.
David Attenborough, charming and knowledgeable, pretty much took charge of natural history for the future. Over the decades, the ground rules changed about the politics of interacting with natives of all species, animal and human. The equipment became increasingly refined so that it became possible to see things never seen before in ways that are less and less intrusive to those being watched. The appetite of the public for observing the lives of animals has grown so that entire channels are devoted to wildlife films, and no expense is spared to find new and startling ways of looking at non-human creatures. You watch the Attenborough blockbusters with your jaw dropping, always astonished anew by novel ways of seeing animals, seeing more of them in every way, but especially in ways we have never seen before. Now we can see everything, but there is a new sense that something is always hidden from us, and if only we are technological enough, we will reveal it. We even watch subsidiary documentaries about how the miraculous revelations are achieved by naturalists and infinitely patient, heroic cameramen, who are now the performers of prodigious feats, as the old hunters and explorers were. Perhaps they are becoming even more important than the animals they film. We have, after all, seen almost everything there is to see, by now, and it is the humans and what they are prepared to do to get the shot that is beginning to become the story. As to whether the hidden aspects of animal lives they reveal are more ‘real’ than what we used to see, I’m not sure. The lights and angles of the equipment present a spectacular that has less to do with nature than with our renewed capacity to look. It may not so much show us reality better as distort it more brilliantly. Life in the Freezer, The Blue Planet, The Life of Mammals, Planet Earth and others are multimillion-pound fantasias, producing a huge return on their outlay for the BBC and co-producers, beyond the wettest dreams for profit and glory of the Disney True Life Adventure producers.
Recently, there has been a return to a more modest yet equally popular version of nature on television. It is almost a reappearance of the black-and-white days of Armand and Michaela, though the technology and sophistication is unimaginably greater. Springwatch is a children’s programme for adults (actually, for that guarantee of the neither-here-nor-there, the ‘family’) which goes out on the BBC for a month in mid-May and June each year, for an hour at 8 p.m. Monday to Thursday. A huge outside-broadcast team moves into a nature reserve and sets up webcams in whatever nests they can find: songbird, raptor, field-mouse; cameramen are positioned in hides day and night to catch local badgers and foxes – really anything that moves on more than two legs, or has wings, and is in the process of reproducing. The nation settles down to a feast of chicks and cubs doing their lovable, fighting and growing thing, being fed by exhausted and devoted or neglectful parents, being eaten, eating each other, surviving and leaving the nest to get ready to provide the substance of next year’s Springwatch. If you want you can follow the goings-on of your favourite creatures, moment by moment, day and night, on your computer; otherwise each evening the presenters will summarise the events of the past twenty-four hours.
The human presenters are crucial. Cute babies alone aren’t quite enough. Until recently, Bill Oddie, a short, spherical and very grumpy ex-comedian in his late sixties, who has an amateur passion for bird-watching, sat on a bench, or in a shed full of monitors, commenting on what was happening, alongside a modern version of Michaela and Lotte. Kate Humble is a wild-haired blond beauty to Oddie’s beast. It always seemed to me as if Oddie might leave the script and say something just awful, for which she would have to apologise. It was a little like watching Hepburn and Tracey, though much less witty and well dressed. Oddie had no problem at all with anthropomorphism. Almost a latter-day, unrepentant Johnny Morris, he would relate difficult matings to human gender battles and stereotypes, talk about birds getting ‘a leg over’, relate a female eagle’s protection of her nest to women’s obsession with the domestic and decorative, for all the world as if it were still 1954. Watching a pair of sparrows mating, he observed, ‘The female is asking for it – and getting it basically. She was fluttering her wings and pretending to be a child – that’s kind of weird when you think about it. Oh, and again. She is doing that wing-fluttering thing like that as if to say “I am a baby, feed me”; she is getting quite the opposite basically. That’s a wing-trembler she’s just had there.’
While watching the mating habits of stag beetles, Oddie narrated: ‘He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady. There’s a bit of luck. One thing is sure, this boy is horny.’ After a fight between two male beetles for a female, he put on a mimsy ‘female’ voice and said, “Come on, big boy, come and get it.”
There were complaints, but, as much as the cute chicks, Oddie’s anthropomorphism was a great factor in the popularity of the programme. Partly, it was the joy of watching car-crash television; partly his anthropomorphism voiced the real responses of a large proportion of viewers. Serious zoologists are not allowed to compare animal social behaviour to human society, but everyone secretly does (doubtless even many of the serious zoologists about their own dogs and cats), and the audience rejoiced in it. But underneath the jocular misrepresentation of animals, there seemed to be a genuine bitterness, something quite disturbing, and it wasn’t surprising to learn that Oddie suffers from bouts of depression. We watched as Kate, wide-eyed, ever-smiling, seemed to struggle not to let her embarrassment show on camera. Oddie left the programme in 2008, just when filming was due to start, perhaps having a bad patch. He has been replaced by another man, Chris Packham, still cheeky and chirpy, but younger and more manageable. In 2009, even without Oddie, the first programme of Springwatch was watched by 3.9 million viewers. A year earlier, one Monday night, 300,000 people saw the programme, while only 90,000 people tuned in to Big Brother, a programme that also uses webcams to observe the unscripted behaviour of animals. Springwatch and the Attenborough masterpieces sit side by side quite comfortably, fulfilling a variety of audience desires. But the ‘serious’ programmes are no less emotionally manipulative, for all their apparent scientific virtue.
In addition to Springwatch and the David Attenborough series, these days wild animals are followed in their own habitats throughout their lives and over generations by dedicated zoologists with cameras. Often the material they record is made available for television wildlife programmes, with the result that the boundary between scientific fieldwork and entertainment becomes blurred, as the entertainment pays for the fieldwork, and the fieldwork begins to have to take account of the needs of entertainment. A serious, ongoing, sixteen-year study of six colonies of meerkats in the South African Kalahari is run by Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, head of Cambridge University Zoology Department. In 2005 it became the subject of a television series, Meerkat Manor, filmed by Oxford Scientific Films, and meerkats became international stars. Here and in the United States there have been four series following Clutton-Brock’s study groups. They were known by name, their matings and territorial battles were presented as soap operas, through editing away from the field and without violating the scientific nature of the study. Everyone was happy, and we now have a new adorable species to rival higher primates and penguins, the previous wildlife celebrity species. Meerkats have become toys and ornaments; they front television advertisements, increase tourism to the Kalahari and are still the subjects of a serious and conscientious whole-life study. Let’s hope everyone wins. We all know much more about meerkats, and although people will flock to see them in zoos, if they can’t afford to go out to see them in the wild, there is no attempt to capture meerkats to study in the laboratory, or to bring more of them into captivity for the added pleasure of their adoring public. Meerkats in the wild are what we want to see. The public and the scientists know that we can only witness how they really are (their natural cuteness or zoological and evolutionary features) if they are free to be where they are supposed to be and behaving as they would behave if no one was there at all. But what we most adore has to become an object, so the toys, keyrings and puppets will keep coming. Does this play back into the scientific study, or change how we view the actual animals? It must. It’s another way in which it’s impossible to look without altering what is being looked at.
People are present in the Kalahari meerkats’ lives, virtually all the time. You can even, at a price, join the study, either as a graduate volunteer or as a fee-paying amateur, though you will be carefully overseen and trained. In its brochure, the organisation Earthwatch, which conjoins holidays and eco-study, offers anyone who can run well enough to keep up with their subjects a meerkat study-fortnight, and the chance to mingle with real scientists for $3,950, not including airfares. You can observe and work with
six habituated colonies of meerkats in this 25-square-kilometer reserve. You’ll learn the techniques of radiotracking and focal sampling, GPS referencing, as well as how to weigh meerkats. This data will help evaluate how cooperative breeding affects the survival of both pups and helpers. You will also investigate interactions between the meerkats and a kleptoparasitic bird species, the forktailed drongo. Supplementing the meerkat studies, you’ll help conduct biodiversity, invertebrates, and plant surveys and spend some time recording the size and activity of social bird colonies, like pied babblers and weavers, in response to rainfall levels. You’ll also help outreach efforts to assist the local community primary school – all this against a backdrop of gemsbok, hartebeest, springbok, duiker, steenbok, bat-eared foxes, three kinds of mongooses, many birds, and the fantastic creatures of the Kalahari night.
You will be housed in your own thatched-roof rondavel with a cold-water sink, basic furnishings, electricity, and a fan. Hot showers and flush toilets will be available in a nearby building. The team will be part of ongoing research programs at the reserve and you will have a chance to interact with a variety of researchers – whether discussing their current studies or joining them in a game of volleyball! Breakfast and lunch will be self-serve and a local cook will provide wonderful evening meals, including pasta, fish, chicken, and traditional dishes. Volunteers will be invited to help with food preparation at a weekly barbecue.2
The Kalahari meerkats are ‘habituated’ to humans. This is what makes them visible to the cameras. Before the study can start, they have to be made so used to people being there with their clipboards and cameras that they no longer take any notice – any more than they would if a tree continued to be a tree, after the surprise of it suddenly growing in their territory had worn off. Researchers, paid and paying, spend their days with the families of meerkats, keeping up with their life by sitting on a rock making notes, and running after them when they make a move to find new places to forage, or to go to war with a neighbouring colony. So long as the humans do not feed them or interfere in any way in their day-to-day activities, it is assumed that the meerkats now behave completely naturally while people are around. It is the basis of zoological field studies, but I’m not sure that habituating an animal to human presence necessarily means that its behaviour remains the same as when it wasn’t being watched. Just carry on, pay no mind to us, we’re only looking.
Getting the chance to watch what you can’t see by sitting in your room looking out at the garden is irresistible. In 2006 I was asked to write a travel article for the Observer newspaper. With one eye on this distantly projected book, I decided to go on an Earthwatch expedition, not to see the meerkats of the Kalahari – I don’t run fast enough – but to join an ongoing study of elephants in Kenya. I was also interested in the idea of Earthwatch.
Just giving money where it is needed has rather gone out of fashion. Almost invariably, in order to get your money for a good cause, someone has to run a race, or cycle round the world, offer you dinner with the stars, write you regular letters telling you how they’re getting on, or allow you to pretend to be a scientist. Only some of these things might actually be helpful to those in need of what your money will buy. There are a variety of travel businesses which attach the now essential commercial prefix to their products and offer eco-tourism, but they are generally profit-making enterprises. Earthwatch is a registered charity which sets up and funds, or helps to support, peer-reviewed research projects, and offers untrained, non-academic individuals the chance, for a payment equivalent to the cost of an exotic holiday, to contribute money and assist scientists with those projects all over the world. When you sign up with Earthwatch you are not a holidaymaker or a paying customer, but a ‘volunteer’; you are encouraged to feel that you’ve come to work and be of use to the project you choose, as well as to support it financially. You may not have a PhD in zoology but you can look, count and fill in vital data sheets – the kind of labour-intensive data collection that doesn’t necessarily need to be done by highly qualified scientists.
The Earthwatch expedition guide had a question on the first page: ‘Where do you want to go to make a difference?’ followed by more than 130 potential answers. I could have studied Malaysian bats, Sri Lankan temple monkeys, Madagascan lemurs, Australian koala ecology, Costa Rican sea turtles, Britain’s basking sharks or those meerkats in the Kalahari. There were two limiting factors: I’ve got a foot problem and I am indolence personified. Elephants were the answer. Not that they don’t range far and move surprisingly fast, but the rules of the Tsavo Wildlife Park, and the commonsense requirement for staying alive in the bush, meant that all the surveying had to be done from a jeep.
My first sighting of elephants as I’d arrived at my destination was startling. It turned out that elephants are red. At least, they are in the spring in southern Kenya’s Tsavo wildlife reserve, when they are coloured a rich terracotta from the brilliantly henna-coloured mud and dust in which they wallow. A troop of them were waiting for our group of seven volunteers when we arrived at the hotel. Just beyond the hotel veranda was the edge of the wildlife park, marked by an electric fence, and right there, no more than twenty-five feet away, as we stood looking out, was a waterhole, and around it were fifteen glowing-red elephants, drinking, showering and grazing idly. It might have been staged (there were dark rumours of bananas scattered at night by hotel employees to attract wildlife to the waterhole, and either the hotel or the waterhole didn’t just happen to be there), but it was thrilling. None of us, from the UK, the US and Europe, was so familiar with wild animals just doing what they do right in front of us that we didn’t gasp at the sight. People may not instantly identify with elephants as they do with meerkats; but they are indisputably large, and size is important in the human hierarchy of beloved animals. Very big and quite small are good; the very small (insects and bacteria) are generally excluded from the lovability list. People, of course, unless they are small children of the sort that please us, are also not very high on the adorability scale.
In order to get to the elephants we had paid to watch, we had a six-hour journey south by jeep from Nairobi along the Mombasa road to Tsavo. This was also looking. I peered out of the window as we sped towards our elephants. We passed one shanty town after another, strung out along the side of the road like rotted teeth. For 100 or 200 yards, shacks made of corrugated tin, bits of sacking and timber offcuts advertised themselves as hotels (‘Invitation to Happiness’), butcheries (unnervingly, usually attached to the hotels), general stores (‘Strongest, longest, most lasting barbed wire available here’), bars (‘Honeymoon Pub and Restaurant’, ‘Lifestyle Bar’, ‘Ghetto Heaven Bar’), makeshift medical centres and coffin-makers (‘Specialists in coffins of all sizes’). Potholes filled with fetid water after the first rains of the year were splashing-pools for small children, while the adults sat – as if exemplars of what happens after the children have used up their young energy – listlessly, chatting or staring, or lolling outside the shops that it was hard to imagine had much trade apart from the drivers of the parked trucks lining the road, spewing diesel and making the bright Kenyan daylight grey-green with fumes. There was plenty of opportunity to think about tourism, eco or otherwise, as we slowed down a little to drive past these jerry-built villages. Children waved wildly at us and we waved back in a way I wished not to be regal but had to be under the circumstances; while the adults, if they noticed us at all, just glanced up for a moment with little curiosity, and then looked away to get on with their own thoughts and conversations, knowing that we were not likely customers and had nothing to do with their lives. We were just passing through on our way to a wildlife lodge. I wasn’t at all sure during that journey that paying to collect data for a scientific study saved me in any way from being a first-worlder gawping safely from my expensive vehicle at the harshest end of the real world and throwing it a few quid I could easily afford to salve my conscience: a tourist, in other words. No one suggested we stop at any of the villages. We were paying, after all, to look at elephants, not people.
Earthwatch had funded this particular elephant research project for a couple of years. It was conceived and headed by Dr Barbara McKnight, a woman in her early fifties, originally from Colorado but now firmly Kenyan. She met us and (with a degree of impatience) gave us a few moments to find and settle into our rooms before she started our training. McKnight, although blond, was much slighter and less lush than Michaela or Lotte; it was very unlikely that she had a scarlet lipstick in the pocket of her khaki shorts. She was intense, brisk and rugged in her tiny way, and had the beauty of someone with perfect bone structure and compelling blue eyes who had much better things to do than worry about how she looked. She had devoted the past sixteen years of her life to elephants. In order to do so, she was obliged to train and work with others, deal with officials from Earthwatch and the Kenyan civil service, and even put up with a stream of well-meaning amateurs who, though they had their uses (money and some degree of data-collecting), were annoyingly time-consuming. She was a little out of the way of polite small talk, but made a tremendous and nearly successful effort not to show her irritation with having to deal with another bunch of elephant-ignorant incomers.
We were a willing bunch, though, and tried to prove it by showering, changing and assembling in a classroom at the hotel within the hour to be introduced to our task. We had that afternoon and the following day to get up to speed and become useful observers. McKnight and her assistant, Patrick Kodi, who she had trained herself, gave us lessons in sexing elephants (occasionally extremely obvious – ‘That elephant’s got five legs … Oh, I see’ – but not always), understanding what kind of social groupings we would be seeing, how to spot a calf under a year old, how to identify and mark down the individuals on our clipboards by the holes or raggedy and unique notches in their ears. We learned to recognise when a bull had massively (and dangerously) raised testosterone levels during his period of musth, by the weeping glands on his face, the runnel of semen seeping down his hind legs and the fact that each ear flapped alternately instead of together as was usually the case, and when to spot that it was time to get the hell out of his way – if he’s trumpeting and running at you, you’ve left it a bit late. In addition, we were to count and identify any other wildlife we came across: giraffe, hippo, zebra, buffalo, gazelle, gerenuk and, my personal favourite, the diminutive, meticulously formed dik-dik.
Tsavo had been a trophy-hunting game park before it was a wildlife reserve, and once the rich folk arriving to kill for fun had stopped, local gangs poaching for ivory and bushmeat became rife. Of the estimated minimum of 35,000 elephants in 1969, only 10,397 remained to be counted by 2005. There was also a conflict between the human population, rural people who were growing crops or keeping livestock, and the elephants who roamed their traditional territories which now included the land people had planted up in order to try and make their living. Having your year’s corn trampled by a passing elephant going the way they had always gone en route to their different waterholes and oblivious of its new use, caused lethal hostility. Elephants were being killed to preserve local people’s livelihoods. An important funding reason for McKnight’s research was to survey the movements of the elephants in the area over several seasons to understand their traditional routes, and to see how to establish safer pathways in order to protect both the local communities from the elephants and the elephants from the local communities.
Sixteen years of being in Tsavo, living miles from the lodge, up in the hills in a two-roomed cabin in the bush with no electricity or plumbing, thinking, breathing and, for all I know, dreaming elephants had had their effect on Barbara McKnight’s pronouns.
‘When you’re all in the jeep scanning for elephants, one person always needs to be looking in the other direction. Someone might be coming up behind.’
It took a while for us novices to understand that by ‘someone’ Barbara meant an elephant. It became increasingly clear that elephants peopled her world, and that people were generally what got in the way of her study of her chosen species. She was a delight. Single-minded, obsessed, passionate about elephants, but, once she had decided that we were going to be reasonably serious and useful assistants, she was in addition wry, witty, considerate and good company. I whisper that last sentence. ‘What are you gonna write about me?’ she snarled when, in a moment of lapsed concentration, I was chatting politics or possibly frocks with my fellow volunteers in the jeep, instead of silently, intently, monitoring the landscape.
‘That you’re a harridan, terrifying, a totalitarian monster who had us all cowering and weeping in the back of the jeep.’
‘Good,’ she beamed, entirely satisfied. ‘Now stop talking and look for elephants.’
Her obsession and her purpose in making the world safer for elephants made it seem perfectly reasonable to sit all day long, from early morning until dusk, in a very slow-moving jeep, on the lookout, counting, noting GPS coordinates, and even, on some days, seeing no wildlife at all. Barbara’s passion for elephants gave the point to the whole exercise and made us want to work at it seriously. (Apart, of course, from those times when Miss was distracted by her mapwork, and we became indistinguishable from a bunch of chattering schoolkids.) Our days began with a group breakfast at 6.30 a.m., and we spent up to twelve hours in the field, jeep-bound with packed lunches. Bush-breaks for a pee were allowed only when we came across an acceptably safe arrangement of shrubbery. ‘Make a noise, sing or something while you’re at it,’ we were advised.
The difference, if there really was one, between a regular modern safari holiday purchaser and us Earthwatch volunteers who paid ‘minimum contributions’ to participate in our chosen project, was the nature of our looking. We sat and stood in groups of three or four at the back of two jeeps, which moved at a glacially slow pace. We stood proud of the open roof looking north, south, east and west for elephants, some of us focusing on the distance with binoculars, others looking more closely into the surrounding bush. When we saw any wildlife, we called out the species and the number of them (‘five kudu, three giraffe, a partridge in a pear tree’), the person with the GPS called out the coordinates and the designated notetakers wrote the information down on the grid sheets on their clipboard. Once we spotted elephants, the driver (Patrick or Chege) stopped and we all stood and peered through our binoculars, whispered to each other, trying to assess the composition and gender of the group. This one’s head was more domed, that one’s flatter, so this many young males, females, juveniles and infants, we concluded, once we had stopped adoring the babies, who had the same awful and touchingly hilarious difficulty with their trunk as kittens do with their tails: unable to get it under control, it generally lagged behind them and got in a terrible tangle between their feet and sent them flying. When we pulled ourselves together, or Barbara had called us to order (Patrick and Chege were more benevolent) we described the adult elephants’ ear notches and tears, broken tusks and scars for the note-taker to draw on the sheets. Then we remained perfectly still and silent, as perfectly still and silent as half a dozen people in a jeep at ninety degrees of heat could be, while we waited and watched, sometimes for half an hour or more, to see what the elephants we had come across would do. The concentration is intense. I flick a fly away from my sweaty face, and it buzzes off to the person sitting next to me. She flaps her hand and the fly tries its luck in the back of the jeep, darting with each wave of a human hand on to the next nearest dripping forehead. No one is conscious of the journey of the fly, which perhaps we might have watched with as much interest as we did every move of the elephants.
In their groups, they crossed the made-up track in front of us or behind us, with their leisurely, swaying walk, stopping sometimes to let ‘someone’ catch up, or to investigate some interesting marker dung or possible food, and we waited for as long as it took. Sometimes they stopped to eat some grass inches away from our window, on the edge of the road, and while we watched, hushed in awe and because any sudden noise might frighten them, used as they were to Barbara’s jeeps, we tried to identify any known individuals by their oddities, and add new ones to the database.
If Barbara was in our jeep, she would whisper the name of an elephant, pointing out the notch at the bottom of the right ear. Or further in the distance, identify a male in musth. ‘There’s Darwin,’ or ‘Livingstone,’ like a proud parent, awed by the beauty and energy of her boys. She knew most of the elephants and described their history, including the illnesses, accidents and human cruelty they had encountered. But she spoke in a different voice about the musth males; they were her special favourites. Most of the time, during the years of research, outside the tourist or ‘volunteer’ season, Barbara drove a jeep alone around the tracks, to sit and watch, and although the elephants weren’t completely habituated as the meerkats are, they began as the years rolled on to ignore her or accept that her presence was inevitable. I wondered if they recognised her, knew her, as they knew each other. Did they know the difference between her in her jeep and the tourists? ‘How can I tell?’ she said, shrugging and rejecting a hint of sentiment, not leaving any space for the question I really wanted to ask about whether she would like them to regard her as a friendly familiar. For us volunteers, we got satisfaction in identifying which were male or female, and increasingly noticing details of elephants’ ears. I was content simply to have the opportunity to watch at such length these most extraordinary graceful, delicate creatures getting on with their lives. Completely strange, and also familiar. Like anything you look at intensely, even flies, even people. There was never any sense that we should move along, get on to the next sighting, no matter how much time our elephants chose to idle in our path. It was more of an elephant contemplation than a safari and certainly, everyone agreed, as of course we would, much more gratifying.
Tsavo is a regular wildlife park, so while we were sitting in the blasting heat or waiting for a family of elephants or a tortoise to make their way across the road in front of us to wherever they were going, other jeeps were speeding along the trail, stopping for a heartbeat to take snaps in front or behind us, before passing on excitedly to the next entertaining spectacle. The ‘tourists’, as we thought of them, were in a way collecting sightings and making identifications, in a thrill of expectation, but evidently without a sense that the longer you looked the more you saw. We felt tremendously virtuous and professional with our research cameras (their unnecessary clicks turned to silent not to alarm the animals), clipboards and GPS. But actually we were just concealed and more privileged holidaymakers. We had paid more to make us feel better than gawkers, to pretend to be mini-scientists, while we got a much more exclusive look at the creatures of the wild than regular tourists on a budget. The speedier tourists were collecting snaps to take home, making sure they saw the requisite kind and number of animals (the Big Six, or is it Seven?) that gave evidence of a great safari holiday. Just ‘seeing’ instead of ‘looking’ wasn’t enough for us, as it was for the tourists who, after all, may only have had a day-pass to the park and wanted to get in as much as possible. In any case, the wildlife park itself was not God’s natural wilderness. Many of the animals had been brought in from other areas to Tsavo over the past twenty-five years for the purpose of creating a tourist attraction. The sign outside the front gate said, troublingly but truly, that we were entering the ‘Theatre of the Wild’. Waterholes had been dug to ensure the animals passed by the route of the safari jeeps. No one shoots the animals dead these days, and they are not beaten out of their shelter like pheasant and grouse are in the managed wilderness of the Scottish Highlands so that people can kill them for their pleasure. Now, rather than mounted heads or wastepaper baskets made of elephant feet, photographs and videos put up on YouTube provide the evidence that you’ve ‘experienced’ the wildlife of Africa. Nevertheless, these are zoos of a kind, which are in conflict with the local human population nearby who are farming or rearing livestock, and where animal populations are monitored and culled when they get too numerous for the convenience of the humans and their idea of how an environment should be.
Earthwatch had helped support the training of Patrick and Chege, and a young man, Benedict, aged twenty-six, who was assisting Barbara. He told me how much he loved looking at the animals and learning about their ways of life. He hoped to go to college to get his game-warden qualification. Benedict had grown up in a village outside Nairobi. It was, he said, so amazing being with Barbara and seeing the elephants just living their lives. Weren’t you interested in animals when you were a boy? Oh, yes, he said, but he only knew them through books in the library and on television. ‘I never saw any real wild animals.’ I couldn’t understand why not. Weren’t they just living freely in the bush, available for any enthusiastic youngster to find and watch? He explained patiently, ‘All the animals living in the bush around Nairobi had been collected and sent to the wildlife safari parks. I couldn’t ever afford the entrance fees they charge the tourists.’
Our slow, considered watching in the wildlife park wasn’t limited to the largest land mammal. We stopped to note and look at giraffe, gazelle, water buffalo, whatever happened by. I became the recognised dik-dik devotee and cried out triumphantly whenever I spotted one, minutely racing into the shadows of the bush away from us, and my fellow volunteers cheered (quietly, of course) as my dik-dik count rose.
We spent one morning simply stopped in one place near a waterhole, waiting to note what animals came by. Apart from a couple of giraffes doing the splits to drink, nothing did come, but no one was very disappointed. Waiting had become our mode. One day, as we were driving at our regulation five miles an hour, someone spotted a dung beetle staggering on the path just in front of us, with immense care and patience rolling and pushing a black ball of dung four times its own size across the road. We braked to a sudden halt and waited, watching in silent admiration for the twenty minutes it took battling with the unevenness of the track to complete its arduous journey to the relative safety of the bush on the other side and into the undergrowth with its treasure. It was as memorable as any elephant sighting.
Sometimes the elephants came so close that we could have stroked them by putting an arm out of the window. This was quite scary and very astonishing. Mostly, the group, a mother with young and often a baby, loped across the road, just like the dung beetle, on their way to a waterhole or following the low rumblings (inaudible to us) of other troops. What made this watching through a windscreen different from getting up close to an elephant in a cinema was that we had no control over them. We couldn’t be sure we would see them, that they would cross our path, as was inevitable in the wildlife film, so when it happened the good fortune stopped the breath. To be ignored by animals in their own territory is an indescribable honour. Actually so is being ignored by my cat at home, splayed out here next to me on the sofa as I write, because that is where she wants to be and if there’s room, I can sit here too, it’s OK by her so long as I don’t annoy her. Another species paying you no attention is a most marvellous thing, and something you can’t achieve by sweeping past them at twenty or even ten miles an hour, or walking by their cages in the zoo.
The elephants didn’t just march in their stately manner across the road. Sometimes they stopped, or they were there before us, curling their trunks around the grass at the roadside to yank it out of the soil and then winding it in their trunk so that the two delicate fingers at the end could pop it in their mouths. If you stopped when you saw them, turned the engine off and kept the noise down, they usually paid no attention. But sometimes the younger males took an interest, as adolescents will, and moved closer and curious to the jeep. The strategy – or the hope – then was that he would lose interest if nothing happened, if we kept still and quiet. If we turned on the engine and moved suddenly we would startle the youngster and the rest of the family. Only once or twice did a young male get very close and stay very curious, and that was a bit of a worry. One got close enough for me to see the pores of its trunk as it reached out to investigate the window. The temptation to watch him get closer and closer was dangerous but irresistible, not even Patrick could tear himself away, and that time we had stayed too long. The young male stopped being curious, and slapped the window once or twice with his trunk. We held our breath. Then he began to flap his ears slowly, annoyed at our disregard for his irritation, and Patrick decided it was safer to move on than to stay still. It was the fastest we moved during the whole ten days. But most of the time, the elephants simply passed by or performed recognisable family tableaux. A very young female, just a year or so old, mercilessly teased her older brother, jostling him and charging at him, and whenever he turned to do what older brothers do to aggravating little sisters who take liberties, she raced back to her mother and stood behind her huge safe legs. The mother lifted her head and raised her trunk a little as her son approached until he stopped and went back to his patch of greenery. And out came the little one for another round.
At one waterhole a young male elephant of ten or so was having a really good time in the water, whacking it with his trunk and stomping the mud. So good a time that his two siblings aged about seven and three tried to join in. He wasn’t sharing: as soon as they got to the edge of the waterhole he trumpeted threateningly at them, then got out of the waterhole and chased them away. The littlest one disappeared into the bush, and in a few moments returned (I swear, looking sneaky), walking behind its mother who marched purposefully down to the waterhole and bellowed at her oldest son. Then she stepped into the water and butted him out with her massive head, giving him a final, serious wallop with her trunk. The other two immediately jumped in and began trunk-splashing and rolling around while their mother stood guard at the edge. The ten-year-old stood behind a shrub, and with great concentration pulled up blades of grass with his trunk, for all the world like a naughty boy pretending he wasn’t in disgrace and standing in the corner.
No matter how much I want to remember Wittgenstein’s warning, it was impossible not to see this episode in precisely the human, familial way I have narrated it. I really tried to refocus and look at it as pure behaviour, but it seemed that there was no other way to understand the events I had just witnessed. All of us humans in the jeep, including Barbara who had no problem, for all her number-crunching, with seeing her elephants in an anthropomorphic light, could only look through our own eyes, which were connected to our own brain. And my brain refused to allow me to think that I had misinterpreted what I had seen happen in this family group. It also wouldn’t allow me to think that there could have been any other way a differently socialised Martian could have seen it. But Martians are one thing, human beings in their extraordinary variety and capacity for contrariness are quite another.