How to turn a cheetah into a pussycat with a ping-pong ball
Premier League footballers are not known for their brains. Tour de France cyclists are rarely regarded as shining beacons of intellect. The unfortunate fact is that human sports stars tend to be a bit dim.
So it is too in the animal kingdom, as Big Cats About The House (BBC2) showed. Conservationist Giles Clark, a wildlife TV presenter who recently took over as head of a big cat sanctuary in Kent, was teaching a pair of cheetahs to accept his presence in their enclosure. They didn’t have two brain cells between them.
i’d always assumed that cheetahs, such lithe and graceful athletes, would possess equally athletic minds. Apparently not. Their thoughts were written all over their scowling faces as Giles approached: ‘man, go away! Don’t like you! me cheetah, me angry! Go . . . ooh! A red ball! On a stick! me like!’
That’s all it takes to tame an obstreperous big cat, apparently — a red ping-pong ball, waved on the end of a metal wand. it’s better than catnip.
Not every feline is so biddable, though. Athena was a 14-year-old black jaguar with jaws that could crush a horse’s skull with one bite and a temperament to match. Never mind a ping-pong ball, it would take a wrecking ball to keep her at bay.
‘There’s no way you’d consider having an adult jaguar in the house, even if they are hand-reared,’ Giles said. This would be stating the flagrantly obvious . . . except that he did have a hand-reared jaguar in his conservatory.
maya was just a few weeks old and already she had a mouthful of needle teeth, with claws that never seemed to retract. Giles carried her round on his shoulder, nuzzling at her ears and whiskers: it might have been safer to cuddle a handful of broken glass.
She was undeniably cute, though, with blue eyes and a black pelt. insatiably hungry, maya needed to swallow 20 per cent of her own body weight in formula milk every day, even guzzling from the bottle when she was asleep. When she drank too quickly, she got hiccups. Now that was adorable.
The documentary took an unexpectedly serious turn in the last 10 minutes, when it became plain that maya had problems with her sight as well as shaky back legs.
Giles was left with the appalling prospect that, if she didn’t recover, she might have to be put down.
A show that had been mostly pleasant if unremarkable was overshadowed by forebodings of tragedy, and the second episode next week will be unmissable.
Forebodings of tragedy ran all through Trevor mcDonald’s biography of the civil rights giant Martin Luther King (iTV), and not only because this programme marked the 50th anniversary of Dr King’s murder.
His assistant Willie Pearl mackey King, interviewed for the first time on British television, said he had powerful premonitions that he would not live to see his four children grow up.
indeed, the real truth that Sir Trevor discovered, as he reconstructed Dr King’s life story with the help of outstanding contemporary footage, was that white racists in America’s Deep South would have happily murdered him much earlier.
One image stood out above all others, of a collection of shelves filled with jars of earth — soil taken from the scene of mob lynchings. The earth was ‘soaked in blood and tears’, Sir Trevor said solemnly. His brief film could not do full justice to its subject, but this was a poetic touch.