My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  I knew all this before I met them and I liked them immediately. We share a worldview and I admire their dogged determination in the face of the resentment they faced. Hearing their story made me realize that I was one of the fortunate ones. Back in Surrey my work was supported by the community, which was mainly wealthy. Even then fundraising was hard enough for Wildlife Aid. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be if the community was both poor and ideologically opposed to our mission. Every year Vince and Cherie struggled to stay afloat and to rebuild what they had lost. Vince had run a construction company when he lived in the US before he moved to Belize and had sunk most of his own money into building the sanctuary. Most of their fundraising had to be done back in the US because crocodiles were low down the list of financial priorities in Belize.

  Their lives were constantly threatened. The locals continued to view them with suspicion and antipathy. One day Vince and I were out and we stopped at a diner to grab some lunch. I noticed something heavy in Vince’s pocket and asked what it was.

  ‘It’s my .38,’ he told me, matter-of-factly. I ate quickly and nervously, wondering if the people stopping in their pick-ups were coming in for food or were going to take a shot at us. I’m not sure, if I was in the same situation, I would have continued with the vocation Vince has chosen.

  Vince and Cherie treat injured crocodiles and rescue ones that wander into buildings, gardens and public places. They then relocate them deeper into the mangroves and swamps that are their natural home to lessen the opportunities for contact with humans and so extend their survival rates.

  Vince and Cherie have a hard life and, if I’m honest, I am not enamoured with their choice of animal to save. While I respect all wild animals, crocodiles and alligators scare me. You look into their eyes and you just know they will kill you if they get the chance, which means that I have never been comfortable around them. But Vince knows exactly what he is doing and handles them expertly. Like the best rescuers, he has an affinity with the animals and understands their behaviour. I helped him on rescues and with relocations and, under his guidance, was confident enough to handle the creatures. Crocs are big, dangerous muscular reptiles; to get one of them out of the water you need to be strong and you need to know what you are doing. I was glad Vince was there to step in if anything went awry, even though Jim did mention that my untimely death in the jaws of a crocodile would make a good season finale and boost ratings.

  While crocs are dangerous, my deadliest animal encounter happened back in South Africa where I went down in a shark cage to encounter great whites.

  South Africa was one of our favourite locations because it is a vast country with a diversity of wildlife and an infrastructure that allows a film crew to get around without too many problems. It was easy to stay there for a week or two and produce a variety of content. We had already filmed features on penguins and seals and, after some convincing, I was persuaded to go out with a great white shark expert and shark rescuer.

  I was lulled into a false sense of security by the seal rescuer we met first. Like most rescuers he was a complete nutcase but knew exactly what he was doing. He ran a seal rescue service by himself and his rescue centre was right in the middle of a harbour where most of the fishermen hated the seals because they ate the fish. It’s fair to say he wasn’t too popular, but he was a tough nut and didn’t care what people thought. I wouldn’t have wanted to cross him on a dark night. The remarkable thing was that he never contained the seals. If they became ill, they would swim to his jetty where he would feed them and treat them. If they were too sick, they would stay there of their own accord; they were not confined in pens. They stayed because they knew they would get looked after and when they got better they left and went back out to sea. While I was there I had a go at stomach-feeding a recovering seal, which involved liquidizing fish, putting the resulting fish smoothie in a bottle, attaching a tube to the bottle and putting the other end of the tube down the seal’s throat. You have to hold the tube in your mouth because you need one hand to hold the seal and one to hold the bottle. It was complicated and smelly but it was the quickest way to get food into a sick seal. It also made good footage.

  Given the range of wildlife we filmed over the years it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later I would come face to face with the apex predator of the ocean. I hate the water, especially the cold water around the Cape. I only learned how to swim when, in less enlightened times, my father adopted the literal sink or swim teaching method and threw me in the water. I trained to scuba dive but I was a reluctant swimmer and I was not very enamoured of the idea of going down in a shark cage but agreed reluctantly while secretly hoping for a last-minute cancellation due to bad weather. Unfortunately, my wish was not granted and we headed out to sea with an organization that facilitated shark dives. The guy we teamed up with was a scientist who been on TV a lot and Jim had seen all his YouTube clips. His knowledge was good but several things happened that left me questioning the safety procedures – and that’s coming from me, the worst person to take any notice of health and safety.

  When the deck hands loaded the shark cage up before we left I started to get slightly concerned because it looked well past its sell-by date and nothing like the ones I’d seen on television.

  We left the harbour and chugged out about a kilometre to an area where there was plenty of known shark activity. Once anchored, the boat crew started to throw chum over the side. Great whites can smell the foul cocktail of decaying fish guts and blood from miles away. Thankfully, the weather was clear and sunny but the water was murky because it was the wrong time of year and the sea was choppy. The water was only about 9°C, which for me was far too cold and again I only had a thin suit because I needed to be able to move. Everyone else only had a thin suit, too, and although I had the option of a thicker one I refused because I didn’t want to look like a sissy.

  Jim always knew when I was nervous because I yawned a lot, and I had been yawning all morning on the boat as we made our way out. The crew assembled the cage on the deck and, in my view not awfully professionally, manhandled it over the side. Jim had hired a full face mask with a built-in radio mic at great expense. I had never worn one before and hadn’t considered how to clear the air from my nose and equalize – it’s a completely different technique in a full mask than in normal diving. I worked it out eventually and reluctantly climbed over the side. I dropped through the open hatch at the top of the cage into the freezing water before it was lowered into the depths where the sharks would be. I knew the boys could hear everything I was saying as I went down so I started giving a running commentary.

  I didn’t feel particularly confident and when my weight belt fell off I really did start to worry. I kept floating to the top of the cage and had to wedge my foot under one of the bars to keep me anchored to the bottom. Then a shark appeared and I almost wet myself. Nothing can prepare you for the sight. Suddenly, this great open mouth appeared out of the murky water heading straight towards me. It was terrifying. The shark was several metres long and so powerful it could have batted me and the cage around like a Swingball if it had so desired. The animal made several close passes and I looked into its eyes. There was nothing: they were soulless black holes.

  All the while I talked incessantly and tried to describe in detail what I was seeing and feeling. What I really wanted to say was, ‘Get me out of here’. I was also worried that the foot anchoring me in the cage was sticking out and would provide a toe-appetizer for my fishy friend.

  I stayed down for almost an hour and the shark was joined by others. Eventually, I was relieved to feel the cage rising back through the water. Looking up, I saw the underside of the boat appear from the murk and realized that the angle of ascent was wrong. The cage was coming up at the back of the boat at a slant. It started to skew as it got closer to the surface and got stuck on the propeller at the back of the boat, where it remained dangling with me inside while the sharks circled in the gloom below. I checked my air pres
sure monitor and saw that I was running out of air. After several painful minutes someone topside managed to untangle the cage but in the process something bent, which meant they couldn’t get the cage close enough to the boat to allow me to climb straight onto the deck. Instead, I had to swim out of the top of the cage and into the open water where the sharks were. By the time I surfaced I was so exhausted all I could do was hang on to the anchor chain and hope the sharks below didn’t think I was a seal. Four people had to lift me out of the water in the most ungainly manner. They flipped me onto the boat deck like a stranded fish.

  The most insane thing was that the next day we went out again and scuba dived to put back a baby shark that had been rescued. It was released on a reef just a few hundred metres from where we had encountered the big sharks in our cage the preceding day. I hadn’t scuba dived for some time and, when I slipped on the jacket that regulates air, I forgot to put it on loose in order to allow it to fill out without becoming too tight as I went down. I pulled it tight and as we descended the jacket began to tighten and constrict my chest. My breaths became shallower and shallower and I struggled to breathe for much of the dive.

  It was an exhausting trip and I was happy to get back to the UK where we set about editing the footage into a one-hour special. One afternoon, Jim came into the office from the editing suite.

  ‘There’s a bit of a problem with the sound on the shark dive VT,’ he said frowning.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s none,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No sound at all,’ he admitted. ‘The equipment didn’t work.’

  After spending around £1,000 hiring the special equipment it turned out to be faulty. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘We need to have a commentary over it,’ I exclaimed. So we came up with a plan. We redubbed the commentary from the comfort of my centrally heated office in Surrey with me talking into a walkie-talkie with a hankie over the mouthpiece to create the right effect while Jim recorded it in the next room.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Over and Out

  MY TRAVELS ALWAYS left me feeling conflicted. While the TV show and charity were two separate entities, they existed in a symbiotic relationship. The charity relied on the series to give it a profile we would never have been able to achieve without mass media exposure, and the series relied on the charity for content. In hindsight, however, I am not too sure that being the focus of a television series helped in terms of fundraising. I think there would have been many people who assumed that because Wildlife Aid was the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, it had loads of money, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  From my point of view, I had started to understand that the series was important not just to highlight the work we did at the centre, but also to educate people and to bring to attention the wider issues facing wildlife on a global scale. The more I saw when I went abroad, the more it became apparent that animals faced the same problem in every corner of the world – man. Pollution, over-development, over-population, selfishness and greed; the locations were different but the ingredients of the recipe for disaster were always the same. There was a global band of brothers and sisters devoting their lives to redressing the balance and rescuing man’s animal victims; I tapped into this family for our international adventures but the effect they were having was minimal. What was really needed was education, so in each edited programme we sent to the channel we tried to bang home the message: the natural world is in crisis.

  Knowing that there was a higher calling to the work I was doing made leaving Randalls slightly easier each time I departed on a foreign assignment. It was my counter-balance to the guilt I often felt in going away. Wildlife Aid had grown immensely. By 2010 we had over 300 volunteers and were dealing with upwards of 20,000 animal incidents a year. In that year we became a foundation, the Wildlife Aid Foundation (WAF), with a wider education remit. There was a constant stream of animals arriving in reception and the phones rang day and night with people looking for advice. On a personal level, I found it hard to leave to go filming, too. WAF was in my DNA and I believed the place needed me. I didn’t like the idea that a major rescue would arise while I was away and would have to be carried out without me. I also had commitments: I had my daughters, I had Stani, I had my mother and I had my dogs.

  Sam, my beloved rescue retriever, was getting old and frail. Before we went to South Africa he took a turn for the worse and I was convinced he would not be around when I returned. He couldn’t move and had to be carried outside when he needed to wee. It was painful to watch and although I had made the decision to put countless animals to sleep over the years it was not a decision I could make for Sam. There was still something in his eyes that said he wanted to live. I left for the trip with a heart as heavy as lead, convinced that he would be gone by the time I returned. My instincts, however, were right and when I returned he had rallied and was still with us.

  Eventually, though, like all of us, Sam succumbed to old age and died when he was seventeen, which in dog terms was a very good innings but in my eyes was too short. Sam was my soulmate and I would have happily lived another lifetime with him by my side. His death knocked me sideways and, in the same way I dealt with Dad’s death, I couldn’t face any ceremony after he had gone. I left that to Jim who, a few years later, told me the story of what happened to Sam. In a fitting way the tale was full of the type of dark humour that we all shared. Despite the devastation at losing him, I could still see the funny side.

  Sam died at the weekend and I took his body to one of the freezers in the top barn because I couldn’t leave it to decompose. I left a Post-it note on Jim’s desk and went off to mourn my loss alone. Jim got in on Monday morning and saw the note.

  ‘Sambo is in the freezer, can you take him to the pet crem?’ it said.

  Reluctantly Jim went up and recovered the body. He explained later that he was quite perturbed and thought poor Sam had died with a snarl on his face because rictus and the cold had pulled his lips back. Sam was big, really heavy, and he was frozen solid. Jim had to wrestle him out of the freezer and struggled to wrap his body in a blanket. His car was parked at the front of the centre so he needed to walk past all our buildings and past the farmhouse and offices, carrying the body. He didn’t want me to see him because he knew it would upset me, so he tried to get from one side of the centre to the other as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, as he was halfway through his journey with a frozen dog wrapped awkwardly in his arms, he heard me walking towards him speaking on the telephone. Quick as a flash Jim jumped behind some hedges. Apparently, I stopped just out of eyesight to carry on the conversation and smoke a cigarette. Sam’s body got heavier and heavier and started to slip through the blanket while Jim tried to remain still. After five minutes Jim was unable to hold it properly and lost his grip. Sam’s body slid from the blanket and fell onto the ground with a thump. It landed tail first and, because it was frozen solid, the tail snapped clean off. Jim, I suspect, cursed under his breath.

  Eventually, I went and Jim rewrapped Sam, taking care not to leave the tail. He finally managed to get to his car unseen and put the body in the back, and drove to the crematorium.

  Jim couldn’t help laughing when he explained the rest of the story.

  ‘I got to the crematorium and put Sam on the altar there, then I placed the tail next to him,’ he recounted. ‘The guy in there looked at me in horror at first but could see I was flustered so he put a hand on my shoulder and told me it was okay to be sad and that Sam was in a better place. I replied, “It’s fine, he’s not my dog.” There was a really awkward silence after that for a while as we both stood silently side by side, looking at this frozen dog with its snarl and broken-off tail.’

  Jim and I became close over the years. The trips were all bonding experiences and while we had our disagreements we would never dwell on things for long. I always tried to do my best for the camer
a and to give Jim what he needed to make the best shows we could. The whole team were brilliant operators. Often, I would feel guilty if we had to do retakes or if I couldn’t nail it.

  We were filming a piece to camera on one of our trips and each time I finished what I needed to say Jim told me to do it again. He was getting increasingly agitated and I was feeling terrible, assuming I was fluffing the shot.

  ‘Do it again, Simon,’ he repeated through gritted teeth for the twentieth time.

  There was a tense atmosphere on the car journey back from the location and I went straight to my hotel room that night and felt bad for everyone because I’d held things up. Several weeks later, Jim confessed that it was nothing to do with me. He’d been out with Jason the previous night and got so pissed that he couldn’t operate the camera properly. The repeated takes were because he couldn’t focus on the shot he needed.

  There was always plenty of laughter, usually because of mishaps. On one tense rescue in the UK I was running after an injured badger across farmland and Jim was running along behind me. The badger went to ground in a thicket on the other side of a low wire fence and so I motioned Jim to stop, then went slowly into a crouch and crept up to the fence. When I was close enough to make my move I stepped over it. I didn’t register that the top cable of the fence was making a buzzing noise. It was electrified and I got zapped straight between the legs.

  Even Lucy got in on the action and got the opportunity to go on a foreign assignment after a member of the public brought an exhausted cuckoo to the centre. It was virtually on the point of death and it came in with a tiny radio receiver on its back, out of which poked a miniature aerial. The bird was not injured and after a few weeks’ rest had recovered so we surmised that the weight of the tracker had probably worn it out. Although the equipment only weighed 5 grams, it was still a burden for a small bird. We did some research and discovered that the bird was part of a British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) study to track migrating cuckoos and discover why so many of them were dying. In the two decades before, cuckoo numbers in the UK had halved. The BTO tagged around fifty of the birds and studied their migration routes from the UK down through Europe, across the Mediterranean and then down through Africa, across the Sahara and finally to the Congo where they spent the winter before making the long journey back again to breed.