Is it wrong to leave doomed animals to their fate?

Was it right for the BBC crew to rescue the emperor penguins and their chicks? And would any of us have cared had another species – one we were less tempted to tickle under the chin – been in a similar predicament?

We already have an answer. Seven days previously, Dynasties showed aggressive alpha chimpanzee David ambushed by rival males and left close to death. Here the tone was unwaveringly stoic – there was no suggestion that the cameras should be switched off and the prone primate tended to. (David did survive, but no thanks to the BBC.)

Yet why shrug off David’s suffering as part of life in the wild while chivalrously rescuing a troupe of penguins? What’s good for the primate ought to be good for the oceandwelling flightless avian.

The BBC admits the decision to save the penguins was emotional rather than rational. We saw the filmmakers blinking back tears as they agonised over a course of action. Even David Attenborough sounded torn as he narrated the drama. “Staring into an icy gully in Antarctica, [director] Will Lawson starts to cry as the emperor penguins and their chicks struggle to escape,” he said, that familiar voice uncharacteristically tremulous.

Officially, Lawson’s decision to get out shovels and carve a path to freedom for the animals broke the cardinal rule of documentarians: “Observe but never interfere”. And, in fact, Attenborough himself has, in the past, argued strongly against interference, insisting it invariably does more harm than good.

“Tragedy is a part of life,” he has said, offering a specific example of a baby wildebeest being pursued by a leopard. “What do you do? Suppose you did something that frightened the leopard off, the fawn would be disorientated and would probably not even be able to find its way home, so it would [probably] die. The leopard would go off and have to find another fawn and [because it had been away so long hunting prey] would have problems with its cubs.”

In nature documentaries, the “Do not interfere” rule is typically bent when it is decided other animals will not be affected. Rescuing the penguins was justified by the Dynasties crew on the basis that it had no impact on any other living things. “There was no animal benefiting from the demise of these penguins,” Lawson has said.

It was just such a case that Doug Allan – Attenborough’s favourite wildlife cameraman – cited as an example of justified interference several years ago. “I was in a penguin colony once and there were big melt holes developing in the ice,” he said. “And a little Emperor chick had fallen in a hole. So, of course, what do you do? You pick it up and put it out. It will probably just go and fall in another one, but at least you’ve helped its chances to survive.

“On the other hand, if you see a bunch of petrels attacking a chick then you just have to leave it. A petrel is as entitled to its meal as any other animal.”

This rationale was also used to justify the decision to step out from behind the cameras in Planet Earth II to help newly hatched hawksbill turtles find their way to the sea in Barbados. Before the BBC stepped in, four in every five turtles were mistaking the lights of a town for the light of the moon, and heading away from the sea.

It sounds like a reasonable rule of thumb. But a more uncomfortable question is whether the corporation, in leaving David to die and stepping in to help the penguins, is guilty of playing God.

Nature is red in tooth-and-claw and by jumping in with shovels at the ready Dynasties has set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of life and death. Cruel as it may sound, perhaps the correct action would have been to leave the penguins to their fate.

‘By jumping in with shovels at the ready Dynasties has set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of life and death’