Sir David Attenborough is not a hero in our house

It’s not healthy to watch an elephant being
torn apart by lions. Calling it educational is no excuse
Frank Skinner

I was looking at the new BBC Wildlife Finder website, launched this week. You click on an animal of your choice and you’re taken to a selection of short videos featuring that creature. Being curious, I clicked a picture of a wise-looking African bush elephant. Within seconds I was watching thirty lions chasing and tearing the terrified animal to pieces. It was horrible.

I used to watch rude videos on the internet and, though I knew the participants were all consenting adults, it could still leave me with a slight sense of despair, but this wildly trumpeting elephant, racing at full pelt with hungry lions hanging off its back, had a much more disturbing effect on me.

I wondered, at first, if it was because I’d read one too many political pundits’ critiques of Gordon Brown’s conference speech, and the glaring analogy was too obvious to bear. But it seemed to go much deeper than that. To my surprise, it felt really wrong to be watching this distressed creature’s final moments — I’m back to the elephant now — especially with the whole thing accompanied by lovely classical music and Sir David Attenborough’s calm, authoritative voiceover. A lot of compassionate people nowadays feel animals have a similar right to dignity and respect as human beings.

Medical experimentation on animals is less and less common, as is the use of vivisection and such in educational establishments. There are certainly greater controls on the treatment of animals in the making of films and TV, so I’m just beginning to wonder if it’s still OK to show them being systematically ripped to bits on natural history programmes.

I know people will say it’s the real world — “nature red in tooth and claw”, as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it — but those rude videos featured activities from the real world too — though, admittedly, I can’t think of a Tennyson quote that sums them up. And I still felt shabby about watching them. I know lions kill elephants — actually, I didn’t till I saw that clip — but is it OK to show the carnage, with classical music accompaniment, as a form of entertainment?

And I’m not sure “it’s educational” gets the natural history makers totally off the hook. If I was making a documentary about antisocial behaviour and I acquired a video clip of a middle-aged man being kicked to death by hoodies, I doubt I’d be allowed to broadcast the whole sorry thing, educational as my intentions might be. I’m not blaming the lions — they have to eat — but that doesn’t mean we have the right to turn it into a musical.

That lions-on-elephant attack reminded me of recent news stories about people being brutalised and abused by the pack. It’s not unimaginable that some kids might end up watching these videos for kicks, whooping and cheering with their mates as the horror unfolds. Could that lead to what would be literally copycat crimes? That’s why people are usually worried about kids watching mega-violent movies.

Maybe these videos are worse because the butchery is real. Some of the video nasties on BBC Wildlife Finder come with a warning caption though this seems to be a bit ad hoc. The clip of chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys carries a warning, but I didn’t find it anywhere near as disturbing as the elephant kill.

I hear you scoffing at all this. You feel there couldn’t possibly be anything morally unsound about natural history programmes showing the terrible deaths of animals because Sir David Attenborough says it’s all right and he, of course, is a national treasure. Well, not in our house, he isn’t. I don’t know about you, but if I was in the garden watching my cat about to pounce on, say, a cheerful little robin, I’d make a noise to warn the bird. I know the cat will bother other robins when I’m not around but I’d still feel a moral obligation to save that particular one.

However, if instead of warning the cute little seasonal visitor, I reached for my mobile phone and videoed every crunch, flap, whistle and meow, then laid an instrumental version of In the Deep Midwinter all over it and spent the night showing it off to my mates down the pub, I honestly think you’d write me off as a sicko. Sir David, of course, does this sort of thing on a regular basis and what’s more he gets handsomely paid for it — blood money, if you ask me.

Whenever I watch one of those impala-at-the-watering-hole scenes, with a salivating lion tippy-toeing ever closer, and hear Sir David saying something like “the impala has no chance of escape”, I’m always shouting at the telly: “Yes he does and you’re it — for goodness sake, warn him!” But not only does Sir David most definitely not warn him, he seems to be deliberately speaking in hushed tones — like he’s making absolutely sure he doesn’t lose this chance to get another bloodbath in the can.

I imagine him, tucked behind an adjacent fern, becoming ever more spattered with blood and thinking to himself: “Oh, I say, the lion’s ripped the impala’s entire head off and is now sucking its brain through its ear hole — I’m thinking Barber’s Adagio for Strings.”

Sir David Attenborough is, when the mood’s upon him, little more than a glorified happy-slapper. Anyway, that’s one national treasure shot down in flames. Next week: Stephen Fry — is he just a smarmy know-all?

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Lions Eat Elephant Alive
Reprogramming Predators
New Harvest: advancing meat substitutes
Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?