Empty feeling at the zoo
WHAT do you call a zoo with no animals? That may sound like the opening line to a joke, but the punchline isn’t terribly funny. Nor was there much to smile about in TROUBLE AT THE ZOO (BBC2). Filmed over five months at South Lakes Safari Zoo in Cumbria, this moving and sometimes upsetting documentary charted the fortunes of a resurrected dream.
Founded by entrepreneur David Gill in 1994, the zoo pulled in the crowds and much criticism along the way. Five hundred animals died there over a four-year period, as did a young zookeeper.
Conditions were found to be inadequate, sometimes appalling, with wild beasts being fed expired supermarket baguettes. The one glimmer of hope at South Lakes came from the keepers and when Gill’s zoo licence was not renewed, his employees banded together to run the place themselves. The cameras joined them exactly 17 weeks and five days in and found much to be hopeful about.
The red pandas had just had cubs. Entry fees had been slashed and “paid extras”, like feeding the leopards, were proving a hit. As much as the zoo team loved the place and all the life in it, though, they had to let it go.
Consultant Andreas Kaufmann, a veritable Red Adair of the zoo world, was a fixture throughout the film, quietly but bluntly trying to turn the place into a respectable 21st-century animal reserve.
It wouldn’t be fair to compare him to an asset stripper, a management consultant or one of the old “time and motion” men. He plainly loved animals as much as the staff did and couldn’t bear to look at some of the gruelling footage taken in the bad old days.
There was, even so, an age-old story playing out, of the outside man coming in, making changes, telling people how to do their jobs. The hand-feeding sessions would have to go, Kaufmann said, however much money they brought in. Modern zoos are less about delighting the crowds, more about conservation.
He listed many of the much-loved critters on a zoological kind of eBay, to be shipped off wherever there was a niche for a warthog or a perfect genetic mate for a leopard. The keepers wondered about the empty cages, who would visit a zoo without animals, where crowdpulling pups and cubs would only pop up when some international breeding programme allowed it.
As they tried to get behind the changes, Nero, a four-year-old lion, suddenly died. The film ended with questions hanging everywhere. It wasn’t clear how tranquiliser-killed meat had ended up in Nero’s diet. It wasn’t clear if the zoo could change quickly enough to thrive. Beyond that, we were left wondering if, perhaps, the days of all zoos are numbered.
Two things I love to do in foreign countries: watch the local telly and visit supermarkets. I was impressed to see that DALE WINTON’S FLORIDA FLY-DRIVE (Channel 5) began and ended with the Supermarket Sweep host trotting the grocery aisles. If Dale hadn’t gone in search of local flavour in the supermarket, mind you, you might not have known where he was.
Showing us around Disneyland, he told us that the place occupied an area the size of Greater Manchester. Given the amount of people who stopped the lovable former ITV star for a chat and a selfie, the population of Greater Manchester was over there too.