I want to help that animal as an individual, but I also want to be able to help the bigger picture

CONSERVATIONIST Giles Clark takes on the illegal wildlife trade, as well as the task of building a bear sanctuary in Laos, Southeast Asia, in BBC2 series Bears About The House.

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

The illegal wildlife trade sees bears being sold as trophy pets and for their body parts. Their gallbladders are particularly prized, as their bile is thought to have medicinal properties, and over 10,000 bears across Asia are kept caged in farms so their bile can be extracted.

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

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. 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.

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.

WHEN we talk about conservation, and when we talk about the wildlife trade, and when we talk about bears

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.