Mammals
Yes please, I’ll have one. It means never having to mow the lawn, and an unlimited amount of fertiliser for the flowerbeds. But just the one, thanks — our garden is not big enough for more than a single elephant.
The president of Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi, is threatening to send 20,000 elephants to Germany if Berlin bans the import of hunting trophies. ‘This is not a joke,’ he adds. Germans ought to have a taste of living ‘together with the animals, the way you are trying to tell us to’.
David Attenborough gave us exactly that experience, in Mammals (BBC1). In a Zimbabwe town, elephants come strolling through the gardens every night. These have been their stamping grounds for aeons, and they’re not going to change their habits simply because a few humans have turned up.
What amazing ingenuity animals show, using our tools and weapons for their own survival
Cameras following a trio of cheetahs hunting antelope in an African wildlife reserve panned around to reveal the reality of this conservation zone
They block the roads, trample the vegetable patches, rip up tasty bushes and even turn on taps with the tips of their trunks, to sneak a drink.
In an episode focusing on the ways wildlife is learning to exploit human habitats, this was far from the strangest sight. At a Chile port, blubbery sealions with faces like drunken old actors were flopping around the fish market, cadging leftovers. Then they waddled off to the beach, to sleep off their meal.
This drove the local dogs mad. You can’t blame them — to the canine brain, any animal that eats fish, has whiskers and acts like it owns the place must be a cat. The camera team captured remarkable footage of the dogs teaming up to herd the sealions back into the water.
The combination of wet sealions and rotting fish must be fairly fragrant. One of the marvels of telly is that we can see all that without having to smell it.
A heightened sense of smell, though, was keeping packs of wolves alive in the Golan Heights, on the border of Israel and Syria, where the terrain is littered with landmines from the 1967 Six-Day War. To avoid being hunted by people with guns, the wolves make their dens beyond the barbed wire. They’ve learned not to tread on the mines, and appear to locate them by the scent of the explosives.
What amazing ingenuity animals show, using our tools and weapons for their own survival — whether that’s operating a tap or taking advantage of a minefield.
David Attenborough gave us the experience of living together with the animals in Mammals
And how depressingly stupid we are by comparison. Cameras following a trio of cheetahs hunting antelope in an African wildlife reserve panned around to reveal the reality of this conservation zone — safari jeeps, around 70 of them, crammed with tourists come to gawk.
Cars were revving and jostling for a glimpse of the kill. What’s the point of flying thousands of miles to watch big cats if the savannah looks more like an Asda supermarket carpark?
Better to let the animals come to us. Perhaps the president of Botswana could send us some cheetahs, too.
Young love of the weekend: Farmer Jamie told Matt Baker on Our Dream Farm (Ch4) that he knew future wife Mari was the girl for him when her small hands helped with a difficult lambing. So much more romantic than the James Herriot way, elbow deep in a cow’s rear end.
