My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  ‘Is Simon okay? He is looking very green. Is he going to die?’ she asked.

  I was leaning against a tree wheezing. I gestured that I would be okay in a few minutes after I’d caught my breath.

  Jim had our big broadcast camera, which weighed about 11 kilograms, plus spare batteries and tapes. He managed to get that up while I struggled to get myself up. After a couple of hours it started to rain, which made walking even more difficult. I concentrated on taking each step, carefully trying to negotiate my way through the path that the guides had hacked away for us. The going was slow and I needed to take frequent stops. After three hours’ trekking we were urged to slow down and told to put on the face masks that had been provided. These were essential because there is a zoonotic link between humans and apes, meaning they can catch germs from us and vice versa. It was a sure sign that we were close. The guides had been following tracks for about half an hour and explained that we needed to be slow and quiet in order not to startle the animals. A few metres on and they told us to stop before pointing to a clearing.

  I looked through a gap in the trees and there, just a few metres in front of us, lay a juvenile gorilla, looking disinterestedly at us. The sight took my breath away. I’d seen gorillas on television countless times but nothing can ever prepare you for the first time you see the majesty of one of them in the wild, up close. I was hot, soaked and slightly queasy from the altitude and exertion but I forgot all that discomfort in an instant.

  The guides moved us closer and the boys started filming. They very carefully moved around to get better angles. We were told that if the gorillas charged us we had to look away but not run. We could not interact with them in any way.

  ‘You are not chief here. There is only one chief,’ I was told ominously. The guides pointed out several other members of the family group and then the ‘chief’ made an appearance: the huge silverback of the group. He was magnificent. Jim was filming me and I was talking quietly to Jan. I had prepared lots of facts, which I planned to use in a piece to camera with the gorilla in the background but I forgot them all with the ape just a metre away.

  ‘Look at the size of its head,’ I kept repeating. ‘It is huge.’ It was stunning. He had no fear of us. He didn’t try to attack us, he just looked at us as if to say, ‘This is my place’. There is a soul in most animals and I got a real sense that the gorillas were benevolent, peaceful creatures struggling to live. When we went on our trip the global population of mountain gorillas was around 980 – critically low. The Gorilla Doctors were making a difference and numbers had risen but sadly people just didn’t care enough and the apes remain in crisis.

  We stayed with the gorillas long enough for the vets to monitor them and do routine health assessments. Jan explained that a while ago the young gorilla we were seeing had suffered pneumonia and had been darted with antibiotics.

  While the park arranged tourist visits, numbers were kept to an absolute minimum – only six people were allowed up a day and were only allowed to view the gorillas for an hour.

  One of the gorillas, Noel, came extremely close out of curiosity and one of the guides hit the undergrowth around him with a stick and made warning noises.

  ‘We want to encourage them to stay away from man for their own safety,’ explained Jan.

  After a while the whole family group appeared from the undergrowth around us and I got the chance to see the newest member, a tiny baby, which was being held by its mother. I watched fascinated as she nursed the tiny infant.

  I could have stayed for hours but eventually we outstayed our welcome and one of the silverbacks of the group came through the bushes and ‘displayed’. He stood in front of us, pursing his lips. It wasn’t aggressive, it was his way of telling us he was the boss and it was time for us to leave, which we did without argument.

  We spent several more days in Virunga and Emmanuel took me up in a plane to show me just how vast it is. The lush landscape is dotted with volcanoes and he took me over the biggest lava lake in the world in the top of one of the park’s most active peaks. We could feel the turbulence created by the heat as we passed overhead. The guides also showed me just how prevalent poaching is. They had a warehouse full of traps that had been discovered over the years.

  I almost forgot just how volatile DR Congo was after spending time with inspirational people like Emmanuel, Jan and the rangers, but we got a reminder on the way back to the relative safety of Rwanda. We drove the long way round to get some more shots for the episode and were on dirt roads for most of the way. The signposts we passed were peppered with bullet holes left over from previous skirmishes. There were three guides with us who appeared increasingly twitchy as the five-hour journey went on. They were talking to each other nervously and, as I couldn’t understand them, I didn’t know why. They kept stopping the car and going into farms. After several stops one of the men came back with a 23-litre drum of diesel, which a farmer had sold him. We had been low on fuel and it wasn’t until we got back to the safety of a hotel that night that the guide told us if we had broken down on the road we were on with no diesel we wouldn’t have been alive in the morning.

  Africa provided a rich source of stories for us. On another trip we ventured to Namibia where we filmed a cheetah conservationist, Dr Laurie Marker. She had been running the Cheetah Conservation Fund there for over twenty years and remains one of the world’s top cheetah experts.

  We filmed remarkable footage of the animals hunting and had only been there a day when one of the sixty-two animals she looked after was injured in an encounter with a large, possibly rabid, antelope that had broken into an enclosure. The poor cheetah, Chewbacca, was one of her oldest, and was unconscious and covered in bruises. She had rescued him when he was just a few weeks old and had been caught in a trap. Sadly, he died from his injuries.

  When we were filming the big cats in the wild we were told not to run at any time – which seemed like common sense given the fact that we were unlikely to be able to outrun the fastest animal on earth. One of the crew, however, who will remain nameless, lost his bottle during one shoot and legged it back to the vehicle, which aroused considerable interest from the cheetah we were observing. It suddenly thought lunchtime had arrived, stood up and looked over at us. Being the good boss I am I let the other crew back away first while I stood there in the open thinking, I really don’t want to be here at all. Every instinct told me to turn and run and it took all my willpower to follow the advice and walk quietly back to the vehicle. That moment made the drink at the end of the day that little bit more refreshing.

  Laurie is passionate about her cheetahs and explained their plight. When she moved from the USA to Namibia to set up her project, cheetahs were being killed like flies by hunters. She explained that cheetahs predated on domestic goat herds so there was constant conflict between the big cats and the goat farmers who would shoot the cheetahs to protect their herds. In order to break this cycle of conflict she had come up with a clever idea and trained dogs to protect goat herds from the cheetahs. She then gave the guard dogs to the farmers. The predators would rather go for wild game than risk being injured by a dog for an easy meal.

  In one sequence we filmed, Laurie was explaining all this in a pen of goats to illustrate the point and I got the giggles. She explained that there was a war going on between cheetahs and goats, which placed an image in my head of goats and cheetahs with tanks and guns attacking each other. While I was trying to suppress the giggles, I lost my train of thought and started to make a bizarre analogy about fruit puddings. I could see Jim looking at me blankly while Laurie looked at me like I was mad.

  ‘There is nothing faster on the planet than a cheetah,’ she explained.

  ‘What about a Lamborghini?’ Jim said from behind the camera, which made us laugh even more. The more serious she was being, the harder I found it not to laugh. To top it all off one of the goats chewed through the cable on Jim’s earphone. It was a hugely rewarding trip and, despite my appalling giggles
, I left Namibia feeling a close kinship with Laurie and the work she was doing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Undercover in

  the Temple

  THE DEVOTION TO wildlife and conservation that I encountered over the years, from people like Laurie and Emmanuel to the volunteers and fundraisers at Wildlife Aid, has been remarkable. Wildlife Aid only grew because of the work and generosity of the people who gave their time, resources and money. All these people have been kindred spirits and we are all bound by a common purpose and mutual respect. Some of the efforts people have gone to to make sure Wildlife Aid survives have been phenomenal. One volunteer, Morven Panton, even swam the Channel to raise funds for us. I went with her on a boat as support and, let me tell you, I wouldn’t go through what she went through for anyone. It was a long, cold slog for me and I was on the boat. Heaven knows what it was like for her in the water, battling currents and getting stung by jellyfish on the way. The most disheartening thing was that after a long swim in the dark we sighted land and thought, Thank God, we’re almost there, but it was still another five hours before she made landfall because the tide was against her. She raised several thousands of pounds for us and became the youngest ever swimmer to cross the Channel when she did it in 1995.

  Wildlife Aid relied on volunteers in its infancy and still does. For many years we had no paid staff at all but, as we grew, we employed people to make sure the charity ran as effectively as possibly. We have an office manager, Becky, who joined in 2006, a full-time vet nurse and also a full-time vet. Lou also came to work for us and is now Deputy CEO. Our first vet nurse, Sara, stayed with us for eight years and after she left we advertised for a replacement. Like all the adverts we have ever placed we hardly had any replies but one was perfect. Lucy came for a job interview and she’d taken a little Dutch courage before she arrived. She admitted that she had watched all the SOS shows and loved our work. She was so nervous about meeting me that she had a quick drink beforehand to steady her nerves. I liked her immediately and tried to dissuade her from joining, just as I did with everyone.

  ‘It is damn tough. It’s not nine to five, it’s nine to whenever. You work weekends and long hours. It will take over your life and I will ask more and more of you,’ I explained. She wasn’t perturbed.

  ‘You’ll also be filmed,’ I continued. ‘You will have to come out on rescues and look after all the volunteers.’

  She nodded and asked: ‘When can I start?’

  Lucy turned out to be a godsend and her addition to the Wildlife Aid family meant I could go on filming trips with plenty of confidence that things were being looked after back at the centre.

  In series ten of Wildlife SOS we headed out to Thailand and Vietnam in South-east Asia with the aim of documenting some of the extremely cruel practices that were taking place in that part of the world. As in previous expeditions we hooked up with local campaigners, conservationists and activists. In Thailand, we met a man named Edwin Wiek, a Dutch expat with a military background who founded Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand (WFFT), an organization that rescues and rehabilitates everything from gibbons to elephants. WFFT is extremely busy, mainly because attitudes to animal welfare across large parts of Thailand are lax to say the least. Edwin has been a constant thorn in the side of the authorities, which either ignore cruelty, poaching and the illegal exportation of endangered animals or, in some cases, take backhanders to turn a blind eye. He has been thrown in jail for his troubles on several occasions.

  Like Wildlife Aid, Edwin and his volunteers rescue animals. Often they are called in to look after wildlife that has been injured after coming into contact with man or take in animals that have been confiscated by those in authority who do care. Many of these confiscated animals are humanized and unable to go back in the wild so WFFT runs centres where permanent residents are homed and which are part-funded by paid visitors. In essence they are zoos, which I don’t agree with, but it is different stokes for different folks and in different countries you have different situations. We are lucky in the UK because most of the animals we see came straight in from the wild and we can release them back knowing they would stand a good chance of survival. However, the sort of exotic wildlife Edwin and other international rescuers deal with have often been captive for years and also stand the risk of being caught again in the wild. Edwin’s centres provide a better life for the animals homed there but it is still not the utopia I’d like to see.

  He took us on a monkey rescue to farmland in a rural suburb outside Bangkok. WFFT had received a tip off that a man was keeping a monkey in a cage. Sadly, it is a common occurrence. People would buy baby monkeys as pets for their children on the black market and keep them in awful conditions, usually outside in cages. The children would become bored of the animals, which are chucked a bit of food now and then and never let out. The animals would become aggressive but the owners, who are not educated about animal welfare, would not want to get rid of them because they paid money for them in the first place. Edwin was a negotiator. He would have to go to the houses and speak to the owners and convince them calmly and politely that the animals shouldn’t be there. Sometimes the owners demanded compensation. He is very good at what he does and has freed animals from the most awful situations – some had been in cages for decades.

  The monkey we accompanied him to rescue was locked in a small, dilapidated cage with rusty bars and no room to climb or move around in and no enrichment toys for stimulation. The poor thing was languid and bored beyond belief with dull eyes and no muscle tone. It was just wasting away with only a scrubby bit of wasteland to look at. Edwin spoke at length to the owner with consummate diplomacy and negotiated its release. Following the rescue, we went to a remote sanctuary where the charity looks after its animals. On the way we witnessed the effects of logging and deforestation and drove through beautiful woodland to the edge of a treeline beyond which huge swathes of forest had been chopped down, leaving a barren, lifeless landscape of stumps. Everything was dead. The habitat had been destroyed.

  We stayed a few days in the jungle to film at the centre. There was only a rundown hostel and it was so bad even Jim, who could normally stomach a high degree of discomfort, recoiled when he saw the rooms. The bedsheets were damp, there were cockroaches everywhere and you couldn’t even use the bathroom because it smelled so strongly of effluent. There was a communal area where you could eat but the food was covered in flies and looked horrendous. We were taken to a restaurant at the top of a mountain where they had all these awful-looking dishes with chickens’ feet and beaks mixed in. Jim and Jason joined the locals and ate native. I took one look and ordered spinach and rice. Jim and Jason were sick as dogs for two days afterwards.

  Back in the relative civilization of the city we plotted one of our most difficult assignments to date: an undercover visit to one of Bangkok’s most notorious animal attractions, an animal prison called Pata Zoo. The horrific tourist attraction was an indoor menagerie of 200 captive animals confined in concrete enclosures in the upper two floors of the Pata department store in the bustling Bang Phlat commercial district. A gorilla, a tiger and penguins were held in cages and forced to perform tricks, and monkeys and apes were trained to fire-juggle, perform in costumes and take part in mock fights with keepers.

  The store owners had been pressured by animal rights campaigners for many years and as a result filming was forbidden. Every now and then rumours surfaced that the animals were going to be freed but it never happened and the owners always maintained that they loved the animals and that they were well looked after. Edwin was banned, having been one of the most vocal opponents. Security was tight and there was no way we would be allowed to film inside the zoo if we went through the official channels and submitted a request to the store management. We needed to film undercover so we hid cameras in hold-alls in which we cut holes for the lenses. Edwin drove us and waited outside in the car. The four of us went in and split up into pairs so as not to arouse suspicion.

&
nbsp; I don’t mind admitting that I was incredibly nervous. Before we went in we talked through as much as we could. We knew from research and from speaking to Edwin that there was a gorilla and a tiger inside, but it was hard to know exactly what we were going to see. For such a notorious attraction, there was very little fanfare or advertising at the entrance. The whole place was dank, hot and oppressive. Everything was grey concrete or rusty iron. Every now and then an effort had been made to brighten things up with plastic foliage but that just added to the depressing feeling of the place. The animals were in tiny dark enclosures. Each one I passed filled me with horror so I switched into work mode and started trying to record as much as I could. Jim quietly directed me, telling me to linger at certain pens.

  ‘Just be yourself and say a piece to camera,’ he said. I spoke quietly and fought back an urge to get out of the place. For an animal lover it was like being in the middle of a horror movie. What sickened me as much as the conditions were the reactions of the other visitors. The people loved it. Kids were pointing and laughing and no one was telling them that the animals shouldn’t be there and shouldn’t be performing. I don’t mind parents taking children to zoos if they explain that zoos are bad and that the animals in them are suffering. What made things worse in Pata Zoo was that some of the visitors were Westerners who should have known better. I was numb.

  The worst exhibits were the tiger and the gorilla. The big cat was confined in a barred enclosure about 3 metres square in which there was just an artificial rock for it to lie on. The gorilla’s cell was no better and I stared into its eyes and wept. Gorillas in the wild have the most expressive eyes, but this wretched thing had nothing there. I just knew he wanted to be dead. He was imprisoned indoors with nowhere to go.