Zoo of horrors exposed . . . but why is no one taking the blame?
Rarely has a documentary left me angrier than Trouble At The Zoo
(BBC2) — not only for the incompetence and negligence it revealed, but for the easy ride given to all involved.
This hour-long look at the South lakes Safari Zoo in Cumbria made no effort to hold anyone to account for the catalogue of cruel neglect at the park, where nearly 500 animals have died in the past four years — a figure dismissed by the zoo’s director.
‘The number doesn’t mean anything,’ said andreas, and this film was too lily-livered even to tell us his last name.
We learned at the start that the zoo had lost its licence temporarily in 2014, after an ‘invasive species’ escaped — in fact, they were ibises, though the voiceover didn’t bother with that detail.
It didn’t bother either with spelling out other horrors that inspectors found in 2016. Three animals starved to death, and two more died after eating rat poison. a rhino was crushed to death by its partner. a dead squirrel monkey was found behind a radiator.
Much was made in this one-off report of the zoo’s determination to appease the international animal authorities by sending their young female snow leopard to australia, as part of a breeding programme.
What viewers were not told was that two years ago, snow leopard cubs called Miska and Natasja — whose birth was heavily publicised by the zoo, to attract visitors — were found partially eaten by other leopards in their enclosure.
The cameras could not ignore all the malpractice. Most appalling was the death of four-year-old lion Nero, a magnificent animal who appeared to be frenzied with distress in his cage. One morning he was discovered comatose: zoo policy was to feed their cats with condemned meat from an abattoir, and Nero’s dinner had been heavily laced with barbiturates.
even when the cause of death was discovered, the keepers did not throw out the remainder of the poisonous meat — nor change their supplier.
Individual staff members did seem to care. red panda keeper Cathy wept buckets after finding a dead cub. But she was quick to blame the panda mother for her ‘inexperience’ — when it was clearly the employees, not the animals, who didn’t know what they were doing. above all, this film failed to point the finger at the real culprits: the authorities who gave this zoo its licence back. That animals can legally be treated this way in Britain is simply criminal.
a crime of unparalleled horror was explored by Sir Trevor McDonald in James Bulger: A Mother’s Story (ITV), about the abduction and slaughter of a toddler from a liverpool shopping centre by two ten-year-old boys in 1993.
Murderers Jon Venables and robert Thompson were released from custody in 2001 and, though one is now in jail again, the other is a free man. The account of James’s death has lost none of its power to disturb, and the years have done nothing to blunt mother Denise Fergus’s grief.
Much of the story is familiar, and this is not the first time Mrs Fergus has spoken in depth about the incident and her emotions, but Sir Trevor’s gently skilful questioning helped us to understand how the trauma still haunts her.
Six CCTV cameras watch the Fergus home: it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that her son’s killer will pay them a visit. We all remember the awful crime, but it’s easy to forget the family’s lifelong sentence.