Five minutes with... Giles Clark

Giles Clark talks about his spending a year working for Free The Bears and why we have to treat the environment around us with respect.

Conservationist Giles Clark takes on the illegal wildlife trade, as well as the task of building a bear sanctuary in Laos, South-east Asia, in BBC Two series Bears About The House.

Working with charity Free The Bears, Clark meets Mary, a young sun bear rescued after her mother was killed in the wild.

Clark talks about filming the year-long project and what it meant to him on a personal level.

When did you film this?

I started a 12-month contract with Free The Bears in December 2018, and we filmed right through across the 12 months to December 2019.

How would you describe the series?

We really try and aim for a perfect mixture of engaging the audience with some incredibly charismatic little characters - in this case Mary the bear - but in this case we also want to tell what the most important message is, which is about the bear trade and the illegal wildlife trade.

If you go too hard I think you sort of end up preaching to the choir people, because people who are ardently interested will watch it but others either switch off or turn over because the harsh reality is it's unpleasant and it's confronting.

So if you feel that we tackled it in a way that you can take a breath of fresh air and we still introduce those topics and talk about them - and there's a sense of hope at the end, that's fantastic.

How did you get involved in making this? Is it something you were looking to work on for a while?

It's strange how life works. Matt Hunt, the CEO of Free The Bears, who is in the programme, I met him when I lived in Australia in 2004 and we started a friendship and have grown stronger ever since. And probably up until 2018 when I took the position, every year for the last six to eight years he must have sent me a job description or a position opening, trying to encourage me to work with or do something for Free The Bears.

I was just never in the position in life where it was manageable or achievable until last year - and then I was incredibly lucky, incredibly fortunate in my sort of personal position, that I could effectively take 12 months out and not get paid very much at all, and go and work for Free The Bears and Matt.

How would you sum up the experience?

It was one of the most incredible, uplifting, and yet challenging periods in my life. I don't even like to call it a career because all I've ever done since I was 15 is work for/with animals and try and do something to have a contribution to conservation. But in all of that time, living there across 12 months definitely had its ups and downs to say the least.

To see people freely illegally trading the products in the local markets would be frustrating?

That market we went to was not a very prolific one when it comes to wildlife. It was frustrating and again, not the first time and not the last time I've seen wildlife in markets... I think the frustrating thing is that the wildlife trade is a very, very complex trade, and that's really now starting to become a focus in people's minds because of the current situation that we face with coronavirus and the fact that its origins have probably come from the wildlife trade.

But regardless, that was definitely one of the points where I felt very low and very down afterwards because at that particular time I didn't have the authorities with me. And I don't have the authority and I don't have the place to be able to go into a wildlife market and start taking wildlife without the proper system to be able to back me up.

So I had to walk away knowing full well that by the time I'd informed the authorities and they'd been able to mobilise, the chances are the next day that those particular individual animals would have not been there and not made it.

You talk a lot about the bears as individuals...

When we talk about conservation, and when we talk about the wildlife trade, and when we talk about bears as a species, it is ultimately about them as a species... but for me it's also about them as an individual.

Because Mary the sun bear, when we confiscated her from the trafficker, or David and Jane, or any of the bears, they don't know that their species is now starting to become endangered in the wild and if this continues in another five years' time it could be past the tipping point.

What they know of is what they feel as individuals, which is they feel fear and they feel stress and they're hungry because quite often most of the bears that we come across are never fed properly. It comes down to balance. I want to help that animal as an individual, but I also want to be able to help the bigger picture when it comes to species conservation.

Given the current situation, What do you think we can learn from this series?

I really feel, whether it's organisations like Free The Bears or programmes like Bears About The House, for me it's about having that respect and compassion and kindness towards the natural world and the animals that are part of that.

The most important thing that hopefully will be the bigger context of the situation, if we take one thing from it, it should be that we are completely interconnected to other species and the environment around us. If we don't treat that with respect, it will be to our detriment.