My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  I looked over to where he was gesticulating and there, sitting on the immaculate grass, was a rather magnificent male adult swan looking totally unfazed by the commotion around it.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ I said confidently, while thinking, Okay, what am I going to do now?

  Slowly and deliberately I walked towards the swan. I glanced at it but I didn’t look it directly in the eyes. I sensed that would only aggravate it and I didn’t want to appear threatening. Having been around animals all my life I had an innate sensitivity to them: I could read their moods and body language and I could tell the swan wasn’t distressed. It seemed quite calm. I got the distinct impression it was just being obstinate and awkward. I was used to Dad’s swan so I had a good idea of the type of temperament they had and this one was displaying typical swan arrogance. I also knew that while you have to respect them, the adage that a swan can break a leg with a wing is a myth, unless you suffer from something like brittle bone disease. I also knew that, on the whole, swans were all bark and no bite. Almost on cue, as I neared the subject of my first rescue it reared up, spread its wings and started hissing.

  I could hear some mumbling from the golfers who were now enthralled, probably hoping that I would be attacked.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said quietly but firmly and carried on walking slowly towards the bird, which started to beat its wings, roll its eyes and honk. I knew I couldn’t back down. For one, I needed to show the swan that I wasn’t scared, but mainly I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of my audience.

  As I got to within a few steps of the bird it stopped making a fuss, and slumped back down again with a dejected look on its face.

  ‘Good swan,’ I said. I stepped forward, reached out slowly and got hold of it. It made an indignant grunt but allowed itself to be handled. I took care not to hurt it but made sure I held it firmly enough around its wings so it couldn’t start flapping around. I also held it far enough from me facing away so it couldn’t turn round and peck me. Then I walked back towards the manager.

  ‘Where do you want it?’ I called.

  ‘Can you take it back to the lake on the twelfth, please?’ he said.

  I walked past the golfers and released the swan back to where he should have been. It let me carry it all the way without a fuss.

  A successful rescue release, where the animal went straight back in the wild without needing to stay at the farm, was the gold standard for the animal and for us because we were being overrun. Each morning the girls sat at the table having breakfast before going off school, oblivious to the activity around them. They knew nothing else. They couldn’t understand why there was always a long line of school friends waiting to be invited back to the house for tea. When they were young their birthday parties must have been the most eagerly awaited in the school. Kids loved the house because there was always something exciting to see there. Fleur added to the lure of it all because, although she had a home in the barn, she spent a lot of time in the house. In the end she lived with us for twenty years – in the wild, barn owls live for around six. She became an unofficial mascot and would come to fundraising events with me and to the school talks I later gave. In hindsight I feel sorry for her because it must have been a crappy life for a wild animal. If I had known more when we first took her in I would have tried to get her back into the wild. She might not have lived long but the quality of her life would have been far better.

  If I was presented with the same situation today I would act differently. We didn’t put things to sleep that perhaps we should have done back then. A lot of people will find that difficult to understand because they believe that by keeping a wild animal captive, you are helping it. In my opinion you are not – you are torturing it. People still do it today – they put a crow in a cage because it only has one wing. That’s like you or I living the rest of our lives in a telephone box. It is not fair. We should have respect for wildlife: it should be flying freely or running around in the wild and should enjoy its life. I think if it doesn’t have that sort of life it shouldn’t be here. I learned these things as I went along but it took many years and, at the beginning, all I could do was follow my heart and feelings.

  Another permanent resident arrived soon after Fleur. It was a mentally impaired deer. We never found out its story and without an MRI scan we had no idea what was really wrong with it apart from the fact that you could tell just by looking at it that it wasn’t in possession of all its faculties. It had lost its marbles. We made an enclosure for it and kept it in the garden for years. It was skittish and nervous, would fit occasionally and wasn’t particularly confident on its feet. Dad was the only one who could get close to it. He had a way with animals, which is probably where I got it from. He loved that deer, even after it stuck its antler right through his leg one day.

  Meanwhile, the dogs remained calm and took the presence of all the other animals for granted, which was bizarre because out on a walk they would chase anything. But if they were walking up the garden and a duck waddled across the lawn they totally ignored it.

  For several years I funded the project personally with the money I was making in the City. I hate to think what I spent on it in all – probably somewhere between £100,000 and £200,000. I bought equipment, food, medical supplies and bedding. We begged and borrowed as well. We spoke to local hospitals and got the dressings and ointments that they threw away. We also began approaching vet practices and often, when we had an animal which we couldn’t patch up ourselves, they would help out with stitches or antibiotics. We received great support from a local vet who came on board and volunteered her time early on. Her name was Joyce Tibbetts and she was wonderful. She did brilliant work for us for many years. Joyce would come in and perform procedures if we needed her. Often vets would call us after people had taken injured wildlife to them and they had patched the animals up and needed someone to care for them as they recovered.

  When the children went to school Jill’s days were consumed with looking after all the animals, feeding them, cleaning them, caring for them and medicating them. By the late 1980s the trickle had become a flow. We grew naturally, which was good in retrospect because it allowed us to learn as we went along. On the 7.03 from Leatherhead to Waterloo I was the only City gent reading wildlife and veterinary manuals, rather than The Times or the Daily Mail. Later, I developed an idea for a storybook for children about a one-eyed owl that found itself injured in a rescue centre. While others gazed out of the train window on their journeys to work, I sat huddled over a pad scribbling away intently for many months, writing down the story which was eventually published as The Owl with the Golden Heart. I’m still immensely proud of the book today.

  When it became too busy for Jill to cope on her own we started to ask for volunteers, firstly among friends and neighbours. One lady came in and said she wanted to help on one afternoon a fortnight. She ended up being our most senior volunteer and she was amazing; she did everything Jill did, and which a veterinary nurse does now. Sadly, she died of cancer several years ago. We found that people were willing to come in and help, which was a bonus because we could not pay for staff. As the overall costs rose, I could no longer afford to keep up so we started tentatively fundraising. We would ask people who brought in patients for donations and on the whole they were happy to leave a few pounds in the knowledge that we would do our best to look after whatever it was they had saved.

  In 1987 we became a registered charity and renamed ourselves Wildlife Aid. It was easier to ask for money as a charity. I was still working and I never hid what I was doing from my bosses. I’m sure they didn’t like it and most of my colleagues probably thought I was slightly mad. I got reprimanded now and then for calling on the work phone to check on a patient’s progress and, if truth be told, I was often preoccupied with things back on the farm more than I was at work. In 1992 we opened a surgery, which we created in a room at the front of the house, and the singer Beverley Craven came and opened it. It was a fully functionin
g veterinary surgery with equipment bought by funds we had collected or which had been donated by businesses. It was a far cry from the first medical shed I had erected with a wooden shelf and wooden cages and only one medicine: an antibiotic powder someone gave to us and which we used sparingly on the worst cases.

  In the midst of the madness we tried to lead a normal family life. I bought a river boat, which we kept moored on the River Thames at Shepperton, and we had friends over and entertained. They graciously accepted the creatures deposited in cupboards and other nooks and crannies around the house. It really never crossed my mind that they wouldn’t. Often we would be deep in conversation about some subject or other and Fleur would swoop in, land on my shoulder and eye up the leftovers.

  Sharing the house with wildlife had other consequences that were not so pleasant. One night we went to good friends for dinner in their big, posh house in Surrey. I was sitting at the table having polished off a lovely plate of boeuf bourguignon and a couple of glasses of Bordeaux. I was listening to my mate as he recounted an anecdote about a friend of his, a trip to Bangkok and an unfortunate mix up with a lady he met in a bar. Absentmindedly, I glanced down at the sleeve of the lambswool jumper I was wearing and watched as a flea jumped off me onto the table. I glanced up to see if anyone else had noticed. They hadn’t. Should I say something or just pretend I haven’t seen it? I thought. I decided not to say anything.

  In the mid-eighties the City changed a lot and it was not for the better. Something happened called the Big Bang. Markets were deregulated by the Thatcher government and trading went electronic and screen-based. The yuppie was born and a new generation of brash City boys obsessed with money and materialism like never before rode into town. In the midst of all this the job that I was expected to do became increasingly complex and the computerization of the trading environment also closed the door on one of my specialities: a process called arbitrage. The system worked like this. In different countries there were different markets – London was home to the raw sugar market and Paris was home to the white, refined sugar market. Both were usually pegged together. However, sometimes they went right out of sync for whatever reason. Prices in Paris, for example, would go screaming up while London did not move. This gave you the opportunity to sell Paris and buy London at a wide differential, knowing that the real price would be somewhere in the middle and that at some point in the future, maybe a month down the line, it would come back into sync. At that point you sold your London stock, bought Paris and made a killing. I made a huge amount for the company on arbitrage. It was beautiful. I would watch for the glitches in the markets, buy what I needed and then sit back and watch the markets converge, before undoing the deal. It was quite good fun and I made a name for myself as the arbitrage king. I was one of the first people to arbitrage white sugar against raw sugar, which was ironic, really, as I was useless at maths.

  After the Big Bang arbitrage stopped and, while I continued to earn good money and had six people working under me, increasingly I felt unable to understand what was going on. In part, I started to hate my working life and was relieved to get home and to busy myself with the animals.

  I questioned what I was doing at work. I began to dread going to work because everything was just too complicated. The firm was also bought out by an American group and things changed. Then, in 1992, Black Wednesday happened and the City went into meltdown. The government was forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and sterling dropped off a cliff. We were all at our desks for seventy-two hours when the shit hit the fan. By the end of the week the streets of London were filled with dazed yuppies wandering around like zombies, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

  The job eventually took over my mind, body and soul. The firm owned me and I never had a sense of balance. My kids were half grown up, and Jill and I were living increasingly separate lives. I had done a deal with the devil and comforted myself with material trinkets and by walking around with a wallet full of £50 notes, but eventually you have to pay the piper, don’t you?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Close the Door on

  Your Way Out

  AFTER MORE THAN a decade I had very firm ideas about what our ethos and practices should be at Wildlife Aid. Our mission was to give our patients a second chance at a meaningful life. After rescuing and treating thousands of animals I knew categorically that the worst thing for a wild animal was for it to be kept in confinement. Wild animals live by their instincts and to cage them is to cage those instincts. In order to give the animals we rescued the best possible chance of getting back out in the wild we had to be extremely careful about the degree of contact we had with them. The worst thing we could do was to allow them to become imprinted on humans and so I put measures in place to try and avoid that happening. Human contact was to be kept to a minimum and volunteers were discouraged from anthropomorphizing, which meant not getting attached, not having favourites and not naming. The best practice for the orphans we looked after was to wean them as fast as possible and then stop physical contact unless it was necessary for medical checks. As soon as bottle-feeding finished we broke contact apart from cleaning and feeding. No talking to the animals and no cuddling. The juveniles stayed with their own kind while they were with us and, as long as human intervention was kept to a minimum, their instincts took over when they went out in the wild.

  Most controversially of all, if an animal came in and couldn’t survive back in the wild, euthanasia was the kindest option. As Wildlife Aid evolved, we developed one of the strictest codes of practice of all the wildlife charities I know. While other centres heal an animal and then keep it in captivity, we do everything we can to get the patient back out in the wild and, if it would not survive, we put it to sleep. If we do have to put an animal to sleep, it is done quickly and humanely. No one takes any pleasure from it, least of all me. Often, to complete the food chain and keep the carnivorous patients familiar with their natural diet, we feed the patients that don’t make it to the ones that need food. There is no waste, the natural balance is kept and, at the very least, the animals that died served a purpose to help others.

  Back then, not everyone agreed with these policies. Many, I am sure, thought I was a madman. To begin with, some of the volunteers took a lot of persuading. I kept a close eye on people. I was probably reviled by some and I am sure there are still plenty in the rescuing community that do not agree with my methods. But I was resolute in my belief and over time I have been proved correct. Our success in getting animals back into the wild has been superb. Over 70 per cent of patients today go back out and get a second chance at life, which makes me immensely proud. In part, I know that is because our patients are allowed to retain their instincts while they are with us and do not come to rely on us.

  As we grew, we took on more and more volunteers who had to be arranged in rotas. They learned on the job. The knowledge Jill and I had gained was passed on and I reinforced the strict rules to everyone. It was my way or no way. The volunteers are all incredibly dedicated because no one wants to clean shit out of a cage unless they are passionate about it.

  The charity was run like a business and we developed systems and processes. Volunteers were trained to take down as much detail as possible about where a new patient had been found, the suspected injuries, the situation, the conditions. This was all logged and allowed us to build a picture of what might have happened. We released animals where they had been found as long as it was safe to do so. Our rule of thumb was six weeks: if an animal had not recovered in that time and was not on the mend, we knew there was little else we could do for it as it had become humanized and its instincts had begun to dull. Often we broke that rule if the animal was getting better, and, along with Fleur, some animals that had arrived in the early days remained with us, including a cantankerous jackdaw, Billy, which had been domesticated, Chippy the squirrel and Percy the swan goose.

  On the weekends and evenings, I loved the rescues and derive
d huge satisfaction from releases. They have always been the most rewarding thing I do. Mostly I get emotional when an animal goes back, often I am moved to tears and occasionally a release will be deeply spiritual. On one memorable occasion I was releasing a fox back into the wild. It had been brought in to us by a member of the public after being found by the side of a road, bloody and unable to walk. An X-ray showed it had broken a leg so one of our volunteer vets operated and pinned the bones back together. The animal was kept in for six weeks and healed well. I knew it was time for it to go because it had been tearing around the pen, jumping up the mesh walls. We gave it one last check over to make sure there was no infection and then I loaded it in a transport cage, put it in the back of the car and drove to woodland near where it had been found but away from the road.

  I parked up and carried the cage to a clearing at the edge of the woods. Dusk had painted the sky with a kaleidoscope of reds and oranges. There was only the hint of a spring breeze and the world was silent apart from the sound of my footsteps and the fox turning in the cage. I felt totally at peace.

  ‘You’re going home, fella,’ I said quietly as I put the cage down on the grass.

  I wanted the release to be as stress-free as possible. I always let the animals go in their own time. Sometimes they stayed in the cage for ages before they realized they were free. I unhinged the door and propped it open, then took a couple of steps back and crouched down.

  The fox scratched around for a while and poked its snout out the door, sniffing the cool evening air. Tentatively it edged out of the cage where it stood for several minutes, picking up scents and familiarizing itself with its surroundings. It took a few steps forward then turned and looked at me. As it did so, a barn owl swooped silently overhead, silhouetted against the sky. It headed into the trees and the fox, seeing the owl, took one last look at me and then followed it.