My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  He showed us around and explained that his lions were sold to zoos, sometimes exported abroad, and that some were hunted. He admitted that he didn’t know what fates awaited the animals he sold. He fed them dead cattle and old horses. He explained that some lions were set free in small parks where hunters could track them for an authentic adventure but also admitted that in other places lions were lured into exposed areas with meat tied to trees. He said he wasn’t involved in canned hunting and that the lions he bred were only hunted over large areas and not lured. It was a moot point as far as I was concerned. Hunting animals for sport was not something with which I agreed. He tried to excuse himself by claiming that, by breeding lions, he was helping conserve the species in case it went into decline. At £10,000 a lion I could understand why he wanted to protect his business with a conservation smokescreen. He let us film one of his adorable cubs, which I found extremely difficult, knowing that in two years’ time it was destined either for a foreign zoo or a hunter’s bullet. Canned hunting continues and even if the South African government bans it, it will be impossible to enforce a ban in such a huge nation with remote regions. The only way it will stop is when all governments ban the importation of hunting trophies – the mounted evidence taken home after a successful hunt. Without trophies, hunters are less likely to spend their money killing animals.

  Helena’s lions were lucky: they escaped the trade. We followed them as they were transferred to a wonderful reserve where conservationists and scientists had created a natural ecosystem so they could study a huge range of wildlife behaviour.

  There were many similarities between CROW and Wildlife Aid. Many of the patients Helena saw had come to grief as a result of urban encroachment – road accidents were a common problem. Once they had recovered, she released them back into the wild just as we did. Before we left CROW, Helen explained there was one last thing to film which would make engaging content.

  ‘Feeding time with the Cape gannets,’ she said.

  Cape gannets are seabirds that plunge into the water and dive for the fish and CROW had two of them in an enclosure.

  ‘You go in first and feed the gannets by hand. Hold out a fish and they will take it,’ Jim said to me. ‘We’ll follow you in and get the shot from behind.’

  I knew exactly what was going on when I was given a bowl of fish. Jim and Helena thought it would be funny to see me tackling the birds, which are voracious peckers with sharp bills. Unbeknown to the crew, I’d had gannets in Leatherhead before and I knew they would have a go at me. They also forgot that they were all wearing flip-flops and T-shirts while I wore boots and a shirt. I walked in the enclosure first and sure enough the gannets came over once they saw the fish but I was experienced enough to dodge them and take control of the situation. When Phil, Jim and Jason followed the gannets saw their toes, thought they were food and went for them, drawing blood in the process.

  While we worked hard on the trips, which were often stressful, we also tried to have fun and often played practical jokes on each other. One night in South Africa we were staying at a reserve when there was a spectacular thunderstorm.

  ‘This will make an excellent moody shot,’ Jim and Phil explained in unison. They encouraged me to stand in the rain on a veranda and laughed at my reaction, probably hoping for some dramatic shots of me being struck by a lightning bolt! On another occasion we were travelling through mountainous coastal terrain and Jim spotted a cave in a cliff wall below the road. He decided it would make a spectacular ‘general view’ (GV).

  ‘We could shoot from the cave and get the sea beyond in the background,’ he said.

  I am not comfortable with heights so while they managed to negotiate the narrow, precarious path down to the cave with the equipment I struggled and inched along it, clinging on to the cliff face. I was hanging on for dear life at points, hugging the rock wall and cursing. By the time I got to the relative safety of the cave I was terrified and panicking in the knowledge that I had to do the journey over again to get back to the car.

  Generally, I tried to look after myself when we travelled. The boys often enjoyed a drink after a day’s work. I couldn’t afford to be off my game, however, because I had to anchor the show. I even watched what I ate and when we were in more remote places would survive off rice and vegetables for fear of being struck down with food poisoning.

  At one restaurant where we stopped for lunch on the way to a location, the boys thought they’d play a trick on me. They found the hottest chilli they could and poked it inside one of the profiteroles I was having for dessert. I bit into it and realized straight away what they were up to but didn’t let on and ate the rest of it. I could see them glance at each other as they carried on their conversation. I kept quiet and acted normally until we were about an hour into our journey. Then I started clearing my throat and coughing.

  ‘I don’t feel too great,’ I spluttered. ‘It’s weird. I feel like I’ve eaten a chilli and I’m allergic to them.’

  The boys shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jim.

  ‘I get anaphylactic shock if I eat chillies. My throat swells up. It’s serious. I could die.’

  I continued coughing and lay down across the back seat of the people carrier, stringing the panic out for another hour. I could see how concerned they were; they thought they’d killed me but the bloody cowards didn’t say a word! I only told them that I’d tricked them several weeks later.

  During our time in South Africa we also fitted in several other assignments. I went to a sugar plantation to look at how the industry in which I had started my working life had affected wildlife. We got several episodes from the South Africa trip. The viewers were happy, the broadcasters were happy and we were happy.

  Unfortunately, our globetrotting didn’t go down so well back at Wildlife Aid where some people felt it was taking time away from our core mission of saving British wildlife. It was a quandary for me as I was devoted to the charity without question and hated leaving the centre, but I loved the experience and realized that the series played an important role in spreading the conservation message further afield.

  Soon after returning from South Africa we had another successful multi-location trip to Australia where we made four programmes and ended up staying for a month. We lined up several stories before we went and made arrangements to meet a range of rescuers. The boys got bored on long flights and spent most of the time messing around or drinking. On the last leg to Australia they managed to get upgraded and came and sat with me in business where they availed themselves of the free champagne. Jim fell asleep in his half-reclined seat with a full champagne glass resting upright on his chest. Jason reached over and pressed the button to recline the seat fully, tipping the whole glass over Jim’s face.

  One of our content strands in Australia focused on kangaroos, which are hunted and eaten. We went on a kangaroo shoot one night to see what happened and to highlight the issue in much the same way we had highlighted the canned hunting story. It was not cute and cuddly but increasingly I wanted our trips abroad to show the problems facing animals everywhere. We went to a processing plant to see if the kangaroos were humanely killed and met someone who rehabilitated injured kangaroos.

  While we were in Australia we chartered our own plane, which sounds ostentatious but was the most cost-effective way to get between locations because the distances were so vast. We had a pilot named Ralph and I also did some of the flying. At the time the country experienced some of the worst bush fires in its history. We were nearing the end of a six-hour flight one day when we flew straight into the path of a sandstorm that had been whipped up by the heat of the fires. I was at the controls, bringing us in to land, when I saw a huge wall of dust and debris in front of us at about 2.5 kilometres. The small plane was being buffeted around by the thermals and updraught and I gratefully handed the controls to Ralph who was the more experienced pilot. Still, he had to battle to get the plane down and we hit the runway at an angle
because the crosswind was so fierce. It was a nail-biting landing and I have never been so glad to get back down on terra firma. We took amazing footage of the aftermath of the fires and captured the stories of some of the animals affected by them.

  I faced my fear of snakes while in Australia. At Wildlife Aid, we have looked after five or six adders over the years plus a few escaped ‘exotics’ such as pythons and corn snakes. On a snake rescue my heart always goes a little faster. I deal with it but I don’t enjoy them. We get a lot of slow worms, which are fine as you can just pick them up. They exude a garlic smell that stays on your hands for days. Grass snakes are fine too as they play dead when you pick them up. In Australia, I picked up a copperhead, which is the fourth most dangerous snake in the world. I would rather not have handled it but it made good TV so I watched the chap I was with do it and copied him. When I was in overseas centres dealing with animals I was not used to, I was always guided by the local staff. After a few trips I learned that some were better than others and some were useless, and that worried me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Gorillas and

  Militias

  LIKE MILLIONS OF other people around the world I remember watching the iconic footage of David Attenborough interacting with mountain gorillas in Rwanda. The scene from the series Life on Earth was broadcast in 1979 and saw a young Sir David became a plaything for a young gorilla. I watched it in awe, thinking to myself, I’ll never be able to do that. Nowadays I don’t think Sir David would have been so hands-on with the animals. Conservation has moved on and we’ve become more educated.

  I have always loved Attenborough, who has done a huge amount in shaping the nation’s understanding of the natural world while maintaining his own integrity. Few people have the gravitas of Attenborough and he doesn’t exploit the animals, unlike some other presenters. Steve Irwin, for example, did a lot for conservation before his death in 2006 but I did not agree with many of his methods. What happened to him was tragic, of course, but no matter how talented or loved he was, he held his kid over a crocodile for a photo opportunity. That’s just stupid. And he wrestled animals for the cameras. Do we really want children to think it is okay to grab a crocodile? If an animal is sick, I will get it; if it’s not, I will leave it. I won’t just pick it up to amuse the audience. I have tried hard not to use wildlife as entertainment and I think that is the ethos that David Attenborough follows, too.

  We had a very good commissioning editor through much of our time at the Discovery channel who understood what we were trying to achieve and who let us get on with it. However, commercial television is all about profit and audience share. There are no broadcasters doing it purely for ethical reasons. They are making or buying in programmes with the sole aim of getting their ratings up. The media have a great opportunity to drive home the message of conservation and environmentalism but largely they don’t take it; the media play to the lowest common denominator because that’s where the profits are. It is a shame because I believe people are more discerning and would watch things with more depth and authenticity.

  I have no idea why SOS was successful; it was just me doing what I do but people liked it and I thank every viewer. It gave me the opportunity to do some amazing things and see things I would never have seen. Which brings us back to gorillas.

  As we scoured the globe for potential expedition ideas the mountain gorillas were a constant draw. It was initially Jim’s idea, although I wasn’t averse because I had always wanted to see them.

  With a bit of research, we found an American charity called the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, or the Gorilla Doctors as they are also known. They monitor the gorillas in the vast Virunga National Park. The 7,800-square-kilometre park is situated in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), which despite its name isn’t particularly democratic. A five-year conflict at the turn of the century pitted government forces, supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, against rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda. Despite a peace deal and the formation of a transitional government in 2003, people in the east of the country, where Virunga is, remained in fear of death, rape or displacement by marauding militias and the army. The war claimed up to 6 million lives, either as a direct result of fighting or because of disease and malnutrition. The UK Foreign Office advised against travel to the region. The more we researched, the more I realized the trip was well outside my comfort zone and, while I wanted to go, I was very apprehensive. So was Lou who gave Jim a particularly hard time, telling him, ‘Just remember Dad’s a sixty-year-old man. If he dies, you are dead.’

  However, I had a lot of confidence in the Gorilla Doctors, whose headquarters are in neighbouring Rwanda. They could not guarantee safety in such a volatile environment but they knew how to mitigate risks. After several months of careful planning we flew to Rwanda to meet them.

  The Gorilla Doctors are made up of a multinational team of vets, conservationists and local guides whose mission is to protect the gorillas and keep them healthy until they become a self-sustaining population. They are among the most endangered primates on the planet and face risks from loss of habitat, poachers and disease. Sometimes they wander into neighbouring villages and the Doctors are called to rescue them and take them back to the safety of the remote part of the park in which they live.

  Our flight to Rwanda was unremarkable except for some high jinks from the boys during which Jason managed to get a life vest over Jim, who had fallen asleep as usual. Jason pulled the toggle to inflate the vest. Jim woke up startled as his colleague shone the light from his phone in his face and screamed ‘We’re going down.’ The boys got a huge bollocking from the cabin staff and, when I heard about the episode, I silently thanked God that I had travelled in another part of the plane, but I did laugh out loud.

  I was pleasantly surprised when we landed in Rwanda. Given its history of genocide and conflict, it was surprisingly tranquil and had a reasonable infrastructure. We drove to the Gorilla Doctors HQ where we filmed some interviews and then made our way out of Rwanda and into DR Congo. Our destination was the town of Goma (FO advice: only travel there if essential). We crossed over the border and it was like travelling back 100 years. The border crossing was nothing more than an old shack and the guards were brooding and aggressive, not the kind of people you could have a laugh with. They emptied our bags and equipment, searching through everything silently and looking over all our documentation in intimidating detail. Goma was only 100 metres over the border but the roads were tracks littered with potholes that were more than a metre deep in places. There didn’t seem to be any man-made surfaces anywhere, just mud, dust and dirt. At one stage I looked out the 4x4 window and saw a child fall into an open sewer.

  The place felt tense and very unstable. It was not unusual for gun battles to break out between rival factions and the slightest incident could spark demonstrations and violence. There were hardly any goods in the shops and what little there was, was out of date. No one wanted to deal in the local currency because it was effectively worthless and the slightest political problem sent its value crashing even further so everyone wanted dollars. Before we had left the UK I knew the experience was going to be dodgy but it never dawned on me just how dodgy until I was there.

  The first night we went into Goma it was like entering anarchy. We stayed in a seedy hotel, which was one of the best in the town, and we had our own security detail to look after us because of the risks to foreigners. I lay in bed that night, nervously listening to the noises outside, wondering whether the bangs in the distance were gunfire. Outside my door sat a man with an AK47 on his lap to make sure I was okay.

  I live in Surrey for Christ’s sake, I thought to myself. I realized what a very sheltered, blessed life I had. People in the UK who think they have a bad lot in life need to go out to Goma and get a reality check.

  After a restless night, we were very glad to get out of town and headed up into the Virunga National Park, which is a protected UNESCO site that has many of the worl
d’s most endangered species within it, plus a lot of insurgents coming in and wrecking everything. It is an ark in the middle of a sea of human crap and the park is run by a chap for whom I have more respect than possibly anyone else I have ever met. I only learned when I got back home that Emmanuel de Merode is a Belgian prince because he made nothing of it and has devoted his life to running the park and protecting the animals in it. He has a team of rangers trying to protect the animals from illegal loggers, charcoal burners, poachers and militias. Each year around twenty of the rangers are killed. I spent time chatting with him and he was softly spoken and incredibly nice. If I was a Belgian prince would I be doing what he does? Would I hell! Some years after the trip he was shot in a raid and wounded through his lungs and stomach. He was in hospital for two weeks and went straight back to the park when he got out. He is a tough man.

  We stayed in Emmanuel’s camp, which was the staging post for most trips to see the gorillas. Access to them was very carefully controlled. From the camp it was a half-day guided hike up steep mountains to the gorillas. Although there wasn’t much security inside the camp there were watchtowers with armed guards at each corner. Before we left in the morning we were given a briefing by the guides who were accompanying us. Interaction between man and gorilla needed to be kept to a minimum, for our safety and for the gorillas. We were told not to stare at them directly, to look away if they looked at us and not to stand directly in front of them. It was also forbidden to smoke and we were told not to wear deodorant as they had an acute sense of smell. The guides explained that they would tell us exactly what to do once we were near the apes.

  Soon after we set off I started to struggle. I hadn’t realized that we were high up to start with and from our base we went up further along the slopes of an inactive volcano. I had made no allowances for the altitude and the thin air, and hadn’t had any time to acclimatize. It was probably a good thing I wasn’t allowed to smoke because before long I was puffing. It was a steep slog through dense undergrowth. The guides went in front to cut a path with their machetes. They were expert trackers who knew the terrain intimately and could locate the gorillas by their tracks. About halfway, one of the vets with us, Dr Jan Ramer, turned to Jason.