My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  It was a really important study and by the time our cuckoo was fit enough to fly again his fellow migrants were already far ahead in their journey and resting at a location in Italy. In order to stand a chance of survival and completing the mammoth journey our bird really needed to be with the others so we rang up British Airways and asked if they would fly a cuckoo out to Italy free of charge. One of the advantages of having a television show meant that astute corporations recognized an opportunity for good public relations and to their credit the airline said yes. And they didn’t even expect the cuckoo to go in the hold. It had its own seat in first class. Lucy took it in a carrier box and was then taken to a release site where the bird was reintroduced to the rest of its flock.

  Hopefully, with our help the bird finished its journey and came back to the UK to breed and boost numbers. It is a difficult call when science interferes with nature. Projects such as the cuckoo-tracking scheme are undoubtedly important but they take their toll on the animals involved, as in the case of our patient. I don’t even like ringing birds because I have been called out to rescue swans regularly that have things stuck up the side of their rings. If things get caught and are not released they cause wounds that get infected, so generally I think we shouldn’t interfere. I wonder how many other cuckoos were hampered by their tracking devices.

  However, I would love to be able to track the animals we release so we could work out whether what we are doing is actually worthwhile. If every animal we released died the next day we would know there was no sense carrying on. We know that is not the case with some animals, such as the badgers we release, because people monitor and watch them. We also became involved in a hedgehog-tracking survey in Bushy Park near Hampton Court. The trackers used there were glued to the animals’ spines and fell off after six months, which was better for them. The science is fascinating and I would love to get involved more but I wouldn’t jeopardize an animal for the sake of it, even if the argument is that jeopardizing one saves 1,000 – that one animal matters to me. Unfortunately, most affordable tracking devices are telemetry based and not great for the animals. If they are implanted under the skin, they still need to have an external aerial, which then leaves an exit site which presents an infection risk. Hopefully one day there will be an affordable microchip that goes under the skin and can be GPS-monitored remotely by computer.

  The Italian cuckoo release was a special case as, usually, we will only release an animal in a safe location near to where it was found. As I explained earlier, I am very particular about this because I believe the animal needs to go back to the habitat it knows; for example, urban animals will always go back to the towns they came from because they know where the food sources are. If you returned an urban fox to woodland, it wouldn’t know how to hunt and feed itself. I have released foxes in the middle of busy towns late at night because that was where they were found. It is not our place to think we know better than the animal.

  These were the messages we tried to get across in Wildlife SOS and, after sixteen years, thousands of rescues and numerous scrapes in foreign countries we continued to try and push home the message. We even expanded and produced another series, The Bionic Vet, which was broadcast on BBC2 in 2010. The series followed Noel Fitzpatrick, one of the vets who regularly donated his time to help treat some of the more complicated injuries we saw. Noel was an orthopaedic vet who used and developed revolutionary techniques to help save animals that would otherwise have been put down. Later, the idea was developed by Channel 4 and became the hit series, The Supervet.

  Wildlife SOS was sold to other countries. We were shown on German television. We were trusted to do the right thing and, largely, Discovery left us alone. There was a constant struggle, however, to show the reality of what we did. WAF manage against the odds to return 70 per cent of the animals it treats back to the wild, which is phenomenal. But it also means that 30 per cent perish and I believed that the series needed to show that 30 per cent – that animals die when they come into contact with man. Yet it was always brushed under the carpet by executive producers who wanted fluffy sensationalism and happy endings. If you relentlessly represent a sanitized, upbeat version of the environment, no one believes things need to change. If I was allowed to show one death per series, I was doing well. The executives didn’t like the covert stuff and the cruelty but to me, showing that was just as important as the positive stuff.

  I argued and lost. In the end, after becoming the longest-running wildlife observation documentary on British television, there was an inevitable parting of the ways in 2013 (although we would be happy to discuss a new series). Budgets probably came into it as well, even though we managed to make the programmes with a team of just four people. We were flying off around the world on a budget of about £60,000 for an hour of television, which was not high by ITV or BBC standards, but was high for Discovery. Towards the end of our run on TV I was interviewed by one of the broadcast magazines and explained that I was fed up with the lack of integrity in television; there was no respect for animals and a preoccupation with sensationalism. In the end, I believe that the people who controlled the channel didn’t give enough of a fuck, which is a real shame because animals don’t have a voice of their own and they need someone to speak on their behalf.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Badger

  Whisperer

  THE CAR WAS loaded up and ready to roll out of the gates. I left the centre and I checked my rear-view mirror. No one seemed to be following. It was dusk and I headed out to the secret location several miles away with four badgers in crates in the back of the car, sniffing and scuffling around excitedly.

  I don’t have favourites but I cannot deny that badgers have a special place in my heart. Thousands of badgers die annually. Some perish on the nation’s roads, others die as a result of carelessly discarded litter, some are culled and others are brutally killed by cruel badger baiters. Many of the dead animals leave behind helpless orphaned cubs, which soon die without their parents. Each year, in orphan season, up to twenty arrived at our doors in various conditions; most are tiny and mainly they are in a bad way – sick and dying with broken limbs, wounds and infections that need treatment and surgery. It is never an easy ride with badgers and it takes a huge effort and a lot of dedication to get them fit, healthy and up to the stage where they will survive; it is a labour of love and the release itself has to be planned with military precision.

  We have several purpose-built badger setts dotted around, which allow us to do ‘soft releases’. The cubs stay with us for around six months until they are strong enough to survive in the wild. For the first six weeks they have to be hand-reared until they are weaned and then we break contact with them. They live in groups in the centre while they grow because they are social animals and then, when they reach the right size, they are transferred to one of our setts and reintroduced to the wild. For a while, the animals are monitored and food is left for them while they get used to their new surroundings; then their instincts kick in and they start to hunt and forage for their own food.

  The setts have to be in the right location not only for security but also for practical reasons. You need the right type of soil and the right habitat. They need to be remote but somewhere safe. By law, you are not allowed to build within a certain distance of a badger sett but developers can get a licence to move a sett so we choose locations where there is very little chance of anything ever being built nearby. The setts are on private land where sympathetic individuals can monitor the badger activity without interfering. Over the years the setts we’ve built have gradually been extended by the residents who build their own chambers. The locations of the setts have to remain a closely guarded secret because badger baiting, which is cruel beyond belief, still takes place. Men with dogs dig badgers out and set dogs on them. Often the men will break a badger’s leg or gouge an eye out because the dog wouldn’t stand a chance against a healthy badger. Sometimes bets are laid on what animal will win and I’ve
heard that bets can go up to £250,000. Sometimes it is done purely for fun, which is sick.

  Badgers are docile, curious, social creatures and, after several months the groups we release will go off to find mates and start their own families so the setts can be rotated and used by newly raised orphans the following year.

  Hand-rearing badgers is my pay-off. It’s the one time I’m allowed to have sustained contact with a rescued animal because they need to be bottle-fed as they are so helpless when they come in and have not been weaned. I do everything in my power to make sure our orphans survive. Initially, they have to be hand-fed every two hours and it is all hands on deck for the first few weeks. As well as Stani and her badger skills, we have brilliant volunteers who will take the cubs home at night when they are very small to continue feeding. They bring them back in the day, when they are placed in incubators or enclosures with other cubs. We try to spread out the workload because you just can’t do it every night; it is physical, tiring and emotionally draining.

  When they are first brought in the cubs are even provided with teddy bears, which give them enrichment and comfort as they have all lost their mothers. Some of the soft toys have devices in them that mimic the sound of a heartbeat. However, once they are on solid food it is important to break contact and keep them at a distance. We do not want them to see humans as their parents. They are fed dog food and cat food but as they near release weight – around 10 to 12 kilograms – we introduce their natural diet of worms and insects. The worms are expensive and are ordered from a special worm breeder in Yorkshire. They are delivered through the post and come in plastic bags. One of the annual highlights at WAF is an event that we’ve christened ‘wormfest’, which is the first time our badger cubs are introduced to worms. We put handfuls of them in feeding trays and then watch the ensuing madness on the CCTV screens as the badgers scoff the new diet. Their table manners leave a bit to be desired and the noises they make are almost unnatural. It is great fun to witness and always heartening because, for those of us who have cared for them, it is confirmation that their instinct and hunger for a natural diet is strong and healthy.

  In addition to baiters and developers, badgers are also threatened by the controversial badger cull, which is an absurd policy. The cull became policy in an effort to protect cattle against bovine tuberculosis (BTB), a disease that can be carried by wild animals. However, all the science going back many years says that killing badgers doesn’t stop the spread of the disease. The former Labour government’s scientific adviser, Professor John Krebs, carried out a ten-year trial which cost the taxpayer millions only to conclude in an independent report that culling badgers doesn’t work. It is not rocket science: the clue is in the title – the disease is called bovine tuberculosis; it comes from cattle and that’s where the issue lies. Cattle pass it to loads of other animals including mice, rats and deer. In pasture and in a farmyard what is a cow more likely to encounter: badgers or rats? All our badgers are tested for BTB before they are released and in all the years of rescuing badgers we have never had a case.

  Badgers are also threatened in the wild by snares and traps, which are more common even in suburban areas than many people think. In one memorable case a few years ago I was called out by a member of the public who had an injured badger in his garden. When I arrived I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The badger had been caught in a wire snare that had tightened around its neck and slowly cut through all the flesh and muscle. It was horrendous. The only thing keeping its head on its body was its spine, windpipe and a few intact blood vessels. It was still walking around the garden and there was nothing I could do for it apart from put it out of its misery as quickly as I could.

  In another incident, which we featured on Wildlife SOS, a badger had been caught in a snare around its chest and the trap had cut down to the breastbone. We tried to save it but the injuries were too extensive.

  Some traps and snares are legal. Gamekeepers put them down to protect pheasants from predators such as foxes and birds of prey, and badgers sometimes become collateral damage. There are several types of trap. Fen traps are vicious and can take a finger off when they snap. They should be used to get rabbits in burrows but some gamekeepers set them on top of poles to catch hawks and buzzards. Gin traps are large with semi-circular jaws that spring shut. Thankfully, they are now illegal in this country but we still get some gin-trap related injuries because they can be bought online.

  In 2015, depressingly, I got to witness again the damage traps can cause when we were called to an address in Guildford in Surrey. It was not a rural location. The road was a typical urban street near a school with houses close together. We were called by one of the residents who had seen a fox caught in a trap. When we arrived the full horror of the situation became apparent. The fox was caught in a gin trap, which had snapped shut on its leg causing terrible injuries. While we were there we found a dead fox, which had also been trapped in an identical device. We took the live fox back to the hospital but we were unable to save it.

  A volunteer, angered by what he saw, returned to the road later in the day and quietly made some more enquiries about the origins of the traps. He asked around the area and did some detective work to discover the likely culprit. All the information pointed to one specific resident and we reported all the details to the police. We also joined forces with the League Against Cruel Sports and jointly offered a £1,000 reward for information about the crime. The suspect was arrested and admitted that he had laid the traps to catch foxes because they kept taking the shoes he left outside his back door. Most normal people would simply leave their shoes somewhere else but he thought it was a good idea to buy some traps from China instead. He was prosecuted and sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

  The end of Wildlife SOS allowed me more freedom and the opportunity to concentrate all my energies on the charity. We embraced the internet fully and continued filming our rescues and editing the footage into short clips and features, which we broadcast on our YouTube channel. The internet gives us the advantage of being able to both show our work and deliver the conservation message to a global audience. Our largest audience is in the United States, even though Wildlife SOS was never shown there.

  We use social media as much as we can as no charity can function effectively without it nowadays. While it is a great shop window for the work we do, it doesn’t easily lend itself to fundraising. We have experts who work with us to try and monetize our social media platforms but, in truth, we struggle. One of our videos went viral and attracted over 4 million views but it didn’t translate into donations. It was a video of me on a swan rescue. A cygnet was caught in a wire fence at the bottom of a riverside garden. Its father was on a wooden jetty on the other side trying to coax it out. I had to shush the adult out the way while I knelt down and untangled the baby, but as I did the cob kept coming back and attacking me, obviously concerned that I was hurting his cygnet. It was certainly funny but no less so than some of the other rescues on the channel. And that is one of the issues with YouTube: there is no rhyme or reason why things go viral. We put appeals for donations on all our material but without a secret formula and a way to turn clicks into pounds we are effectively shaking a collection tin into the vast emptiness of cyberspace. If everyone who followed me on Twitter gave a tenner it would be great, but they don’t.

  The internet is good for education, however, and it allows people to access information that ultimately helps animals survive in the wild. One of our most popular online services is the frequently asked questions section on our website that gives people details about what to do if they encounter wildlife that may need help. By giving the public the correct information and dispelling some myths we’ve been able to reduce the number of animals that get brought in needlessly. For example, it’s not true that if you touch a fledgling the mother will reject it. Birds don’t work by smell, they work by sight, and parents will continue to feed a bird on the ground, often for days if it is in a safe pl
ace. Mammals are different, however, and if a human touches a baby hog in the first few days of its life the mother will not recognize the scent on them and will eat them. There is a similar risk if a human touches a fawn. The mother may well not recognize the scent and reject her offspring. That is why we always recommend that if anyone does have to handle an animal they wear gloves and rub the gloves on soil or grass first.

  We also give advice on feeding. I normally advise against supplementary feeding of wildlife because it deadens that animal’s natural instincts to find its own food and builds an undesirable bond with humans. However, at certain times wildlife does benefit from a helping hand, mainly in times of adverse weather. Even then there are rules; bread and milk for hedgehogs is a definite no-no as they are very bad for them, especially babies. You need the right milk for the right animal; every species has its own milk profile. For hedgehogs, meat-based dog food or cat food is okay, as are meal worms if you can source them. And if you are feeding badgers, they love worms – but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the mess!

  EPILOGUE

  Manifesto

  WHEN I STARTED my adventure in 1980 it was estimated that 5 million animals were killed on British roads every year. If you extrapolate that to take into account all the additional cars on the roads today it is not too inaccurate to estimate that now around 20 million animals are killed on the roads annually. Those are species extinction numbers.