Beware the mafia monkeys and their chocolate-loving Mr Big . . .
WHAT I want to know is, how does an ant say: ‘Extra onions on mine, buddy, and hold the mustard’? In New York, there are 1,000 ants for every human, sir David attenborough told us on Planet Earth III (BBC1), and they’re all addicted to junk food — munching their way through the equivalent of 60,000 hotdogs discarded in the city streets.
But sir David has plans that will leave ants in the Big apple living on . . . well, apples, probably. Or anything else vegan they can find — let’s hope ants like tofu burgers.
He wants us to ‘shift away from eating meat and dairy, and move towards a plant-based diet’, he explained at the end of the episode. By then, we’d been primed to turn up our noses at bacon and eggs, with shots of pigs clamped into cages and thousands of live chicks being sorted on conveyor belts.
More than three quarters of agricultural land is used for raising livestock, we heard. If the whole world goes veggie, ‘this could free up an area the size of the U.s., China, the EU and australia combined — space that could then be given back to nature.’
attenborough does practise what he preaches. He told me a few years ago that he rarely ate red meat and no one doubts the sincerity of his commitment to conservation.
But it’s far too simplistic to suggest that, if humankind stuck to salad and hummus, the rainforests would regenerate. such a claim might work as a soundbite for Greta thunberg but it devalues the painstaking work of the Planet Earth film-makers whose stunning photography over the past few weeks has presented us with a complex, infinitely detailed tapestry of our wild world.
The opening sequences, though, were as spectacular and delightful as any in the series. In sauraha, Nepal, a rhino lumbered along the main street on its way through town to fresh grazing grounds.
With tuk-tuks and motorbikes buzzing round it, the animal could almost have been a CGI creation — but this was real.
So, too, was the hilarious protection racket being run by macaques at a Bali temple. the mafia monkeys snatch sunglasses and shoes from tourists, giving them back in return for fruit. a soundtrack of sicilian folk guitars emphasised that this was organised crime.
The macaques’ godfather, as mean and morbidly obese as an aged Marlon Brando, was only interested in major heists. He grabbed mobile phones out of the hands of visitors and snarled at anyone who had the temerity to offer him fruit. Mr Big demanded entire chocolate bars. Capiche?
Even his greed was overshadowed by that of humpback whales off the Vancouver coast that lie upright in the water with their mouths open and wait for shoals of fish to swim in.
Naturalist steve Backshall was also watching humpbacks, this time in French Polynesia, in the first of a three-part series, Whale (Sky Nature). By holding his breath to swim underwater, steve was able to manoeuvre close and listen to their haunting songs. Even more remarkable, we watched sperm whales asleep in the Indian Ocean. Groups of females hung vertically in the water, like skittles.
The film touched on the problems of noise pollution created by humans, everything from jetskis to oil rigs. steve suggested this can disorientate the whales so badly that they ‘beach’, or get stranded in shallow water. But most of the hour was devoted to soothing footage of whales and dolphins, revealing their family bonds and playful behaviour.
One group of Risso’s dolphins formed a tight knot and blew bubbles before hunting, like a squad of footballers going into a huddle. what a funny old game.