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Dec. 28, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
44:34
Reggie Heyworth
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Welcome to The DelingPod with me, James Delingpole.
And I know I always say this, but you can't imagine how excited I am about this week's special guest.
I've come to meet, I've come to the Cotswolds in Oxfordshire to meet possibly the luckiest man in the world.
His name is Reggie Hayworth.
Welcome, Reggie.
Thank you, James.
It's a pleasure.
And he lives surrounded by rolling acres, but more importantly, on those rolling acres are rhinos and lemurs and Have you got a big cat?
We've got Asiatic lions, clouded leopards.
We say over 260 species of exotics.
And I think when my dad died, we did a bit of research and it turned out to be the largest private collection open to the public in the country.
Wow.
We think.
That's fantastic.
There's a series you won't have seen on TV because you don't have a TV do you?
No.
But it was massive on Netflix earlier this year called The Tiger King.
Even I've heard of it.
Oh you have?
We don't have tigers and I have been told by absolutely everybody who knows me that I have to see it.
I'm really sorry to let you down.
No, you do.
And you'll learn that one of the things you're missing is you need the correct haircut.
You need a mullet.
I need a mullet.
You need probably a much more exotic sex life than you probably have.
I've probably got to work on that.
Um, you need an enemy.
You need somebody who's trying to close down your zoo, your wildlife park.
There's always people trying to close down zoos.
But you need a particular kind of evil one that could be there.
Okay.
Don't think of one.
I'm sure they'll volunteer after this program.
I mean it when I say you have got just about the best job in the world, haven't you?
Well, I think so, because I love animals.
And it's not everybody who can take on something from their father, which effectively is what I've done, which is a bit of a cliché, I know.
Yeah, but at least, you know, when your dad told you or hinted that you might be going into the family business, you weren't thinking, oh, God.
No.
I mean, when I was seven and my father said, we're going to start a zoo, I just thought all my Christmases had come at once.
The first book I'd ever read on my own was My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.
I then graduated to all the Born Free books, which I absolutely devoured at that age.
And I probably didn't read anything that wasn't animal-related until my 20s, I should think.
So it is a dream.
So you were seven and your dad, he obviously owned an estate, a farming estate in Oxfordshire.
Yes.
And the house that we're sitting in and the surrounding wildlife park, what is now the wildlife park, had been rented out after the war for 21 years to the local area health authority, who used it as an overflow hospital for war wounded.
There was a big hospital just down the road.
And mostly for people with what we would now call PTSD.
So survivors from the First World War and the Second World War who had shell shock as well as a lot of people who were institutionalized by the local area health authority.
Down syndrome and all those sort of things.
And it was a lovely hospital.
It was a very happy place.
And this was the staff accommodation until 1969 when the lease ran out.
So 21 years after the war my father had to do some pretty radical Stuff to keep the estate together because his father had been killed in the war and he inherited the estate from his grandparents and they had to pay huge death duties.
They were called death duties in those days, a tax effectively.
It's one of the things I don't think we feel properly bitter enough about, the way that left-wing governments confiscated properties of landowners.
I don't think it was... I really can't remember how it all...
What the history of all that aspect is, I think if you were actually killed fighting for your country, if you were killed in the war, I think there was a point where you didn't pay an inheritance tax.
What was that?
Something like that.
But unfortunately, I think because my grandfather had been killed in the war, and I hadn't inherited the estate, and then my father inherited from his grandparents, and that's how they got nailed.
But I don't know enough about it.
We might have to... That's a whole other program.
I am a war buff.
Your grandfather was killed in the war.
Where was he killed?
He was commanding officer of the Royal Dragoons and he was killed in North Africa in one of the first African offences.
Killed near Benghazi in 1941.
My dad would have been 16, he would have been a schoolboy and then he joined up aged 18.
And did your dad serve in the war as well?
Yeah, for the last two years.
Did he?
So he must have been on D-Day?
No, no.
After that, his regiment went through Denmark into northern Germany during the final.
So you come from a military tradition.
I do.
I'm afraid I'd probably let the side down.
Did your father express his disappointment in any way?
No, he was very non-judgmental and very sweet about things, I would say.
I went to university.
I think I'm the first member of my family on both sides to go to university.
My father's description of the university confided to one of my sisters was a useless extension of public school life.
So he didn't entirely approve.
So I didn't go into the army, I went into university.
And did you study something like zoology?
No, I didn't.
I'm not a scientific person.
So I read history.
Not that that needs to stop me being mad about animals, but I didn't know the scientific side.
I would say, actually, Reggie, on the contrary, that fields like, well, anything, it's sort of environmental, certainly, but fields like zoology have increasingly been hijacked by a sort of political agenda which has nothing to do with the things that you love, I suspect, about animals and the things that I love about animals, which are their behaviour, their
I mean, I worked in conservation in Africa for quite a long time and I think...
My own perception of zoology and zoologists and academia was that it just became more and more removed, in conservation terms, from practical solutions that were meaningful to people working on the ground, and it was very difficult.
And there are some fantastic zoologists, I have to say, doing some fantastic conservation work, so I do need to provide that rider, but there was also I felt there was quite a lot of people just doing research for climbing the greasy pole of academia rather than hoping to help the conservation cause.
But that's academia.
I don't know enough about it, but my guess is that it's jolly sharp elbows all the way up.
Yeah.
And, you know, practical applications and bigger issues do get pushed aside.
I don't know.
Cotswold Wildlife Park is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year?
It is, yes, going back to history.
It was all set to have this fantastic 50th anniversary and four days before we were going to do it.
27th of March was the big day this year and we closed on the 23rd of March.
Oh no!
I know, so it was a real shame.
Luckily we hadn't planned anything because, I mean, 50 years, it sort of felt exciting on one level but on another level it's, you know, I mean...
We do what we do every day, really.
So we didn't have a huge event planned, which is just as well.
So it's been a strange 50th anniversary.
We're all still here.
So your dad decided that he was going to set up a wildlife park on his land.
I imagine that if you tried to do that now, it would never happen.
Luckily, from our point of view, it would be very challenging.
My dad, I think we looked at a letter that he wrote to his prospective first employee, who was our first curator, who's still alive.
and was sort of sketching out what his idea was I'd like to start a wildlife park and just a single sheet of paper and it was dated April 1969 and he says if you come and join me and we'll get planning consent and set it all up and hope to open in time for Easter next year and he did he borrowed £40,000 which was a lot of money in those days
And just went out and started buying animals and recruiting local builders just to stick out cages, having got a vague planning consent.
And just talk about doing it on a wing and a prayer.
When you think, I mean, Disney apparently will spend hundreds of millions and years and decades researching a new, as of course you'd expect, but that's at the extreme.
Yes, what sort of compliance is ruining your life now?
I mean, or to go back to the original thing, what's making it so difficult for other people to get in?
I mean, it's a very labour-intensive business, which is good, but it does mean that robots aren't about to take over, and anything to do with employment.
And health and safety is a very big issue for us.
Yeah, it's not a fact.
That's probably more, I mean, that's more of the issues around that than dealing with the general public.
And we've, last year, over 400,000 visitors.
Yes, there are loads.
400,000?
Yeah.
That's a lot.
Loads of things you have to have, obviously, to prepare for them.
But actually, they're pretty sensible.
On the whole, and they're wonderfully supportive and all that, and getting the visitor-facing side of it right from the compliance point of view is just something you get very used to.
And then there's all the animal welfare stuff, animal safety, escapes, I mean, all these sort of things.
It's a lot.
If I had a death wish and I wanted to get killed by an animal, what would be the best animal in your park to do that?
I have to say, from my own experience, I was quite properly charged by a rhino once when I was working in Tanzania.
And I do remember thinking, as it was bearing down on me, and I actually had no I was completely caught in the open and there was no prospect of running up a tree or hiding behind a rock or anything like that.
And also I had a cameraman standing on my foot.
It was all slightly awkward.
I won't bore you with the whole story.
But he was filming and he thought it was perfectly normal because he'd never been to Africa before.
And the other problem was he was French and I was using schoolboy French and trying to think we need to go back to the car quickly and I couldn't think of the words for it during which time.
The rider got closer.
And I do remember thinking, as it came at a full tilt, really, you know, full tilt, that actually, this was going to be pretty quick.
So that would be my recommendation.
Oh, so you were quite, you know, quite... Well, I mean, if it hadn't stopped, I mean, I think we would have been, yeah.
In as much as one ever looks forward to one's death, you thought it was going to be... Well, I didn't look forward to it.
You don't have time.
When you're confronted with that, that quickly, you're not either looking forward or worried or anything.
You're just thinking, wow, that's amazing.
Yeah.
So why did it stop charging?
Well, I think, and it's only happened to me once, but talking to other people who've had similar experiences, what they're trying to do is basically make you scram because they're not quite sure what it is, but they know it's unfamiliar and they want to go and check it out.
But the way they're going to check it out is by running towards it incredibly fast in such a way that is actually quite scary.
So if it's animate, it's going to sprint.
It's going to get out of the way.
But what they don't want to do, in fact, is hit it in case it's... In case you're really hard.
In case it hurts, yeah, exactly.
Or in case you're, you know, mean as whatever.
So, and they've got incredible spatial awareness.
So actually what they do is they slam on the brakes from a gallop when they are as close as I am to you.
Yeah.
Having come from 80 yards away at the speed of a horse.
And they're going like that.
And they scream at the top of their voice.
I can't do a rhino scream, but believe me, it's pretty loud.
And you get just covered in all the dust and the dirt, because they just throw up.
And then the exhalation from their nostrils just goes like that.
It's pretty dramatic stuff.
And of course at that point, you do actually break cover.
And they go, phew, that's what we wanted.
So you ran at that point?
Yeah.
We ran.
She also broke away at the same time.
We slammed on the brakes.
She didn't follow through.
She trotted off.
I was feeling rather pleased with myself.
She had her calf with her as well.
If that rhino had been a cape buffalo or an elephant, I think you'd have been buggered.
Oh, I don't think that'd be nice.
I mean, a solitary cape buffalo.
That's not safe.
They kill the most, I think, of any mammal.
Hippos are actually the biggest killers.
Hippos, of course.
Yes.
But that's, you know, just people getting, because they're competing for grazing and water with human beings.
They're always in the same, crossing over in the same habitat, and that's the issue there, really.
Yes.
I imagine you haven't got any hippos or cape buffaloes or elephants.
I mean, yes, hippos, cape, those big tropical things, elephants we haven't got, the higher primates, stuff that's really big and complex, I wouldn't say hippos particularly complex, we've avoided, and that's quite a relief, actually, because that's where your welfare issues come along, and that's quite a relief, actually, because that's where your welfare issues come along, and that's where the anti-zoo movement, I think, has got a very good point with
keeping these really complex, big animals in an unsuitable place like the Northern Hemisphere with our long winters and all that sort of stuff.
So why is it okay to have rhinos but not elephants?
Well, elephants have got an incredibly complex social life, whereas rhinos are really quite simple.
That's one thing I would say.
Rhinos also, in the wild, as far as one can tell, although obviously their ecology has been much disturbed by the poaching wave over the last 50 years, they're relatively static and relatively simple.
Where they have their food sources and their water sources, they're pretty relaxed.
And they're going to stay there.
Elephants, on the other hand, in many of their ranges, regardless of the availability of food have huge migrations and huge movements and just much more complex societies.
And you cannot begin to replicate that.
And in fact, there's a load of ways in which they communicate.
They're just much more complex.
And they really get down, I think, during English winters and European winters.
They're probably fine in some of the zoos in Florida, places like that, but they're complex animals.
And they're killers too.
Are they?
Dangerous, yeah.
In zoos, yeah.
I can think of four zoos in this country that have had experienced keepers killed by an elephant.
They're always the biggest killers of keepers.
Are they?
Is it because they never forget a slight?
Probably.
I would say so.
And also a lot of the African elephants that are currently adults in European zoos were recruited in the early 80s as babies from the culling program in Zimbabwe that was going on.
And I think a lot of them, they saw all their family getting wiped out and they've never forgotten it.
Oh no!
That's my theory.
No, I think it's a good theory.
Well, I mean, I think they just don't like people.
Does that mean that captive bred elephants are less dangerous?
That's another big issue.
But breeding them in captivity is incredibly difficult because they're also very susceptible to this thing, to a variety of, a type of herpes and that often kills the calves in captivity.
And there are loads of theories about why this is going on and why it's so difficult for elephant babies born in captivity to reach maturity.
But it seems that although the adults carry the herpes virus in the wild as well, because of possibly the stresses of being in captivity to an intelligent social animal, ...leads the infants to express the herpes in a way that they probably would keep it suppressed in the wild and that's one of the theories about why they succumb and infant mortality is quite high.
So again, recruitment into the zoo population is not good.
It's a very complicated subject, but I'm just so relieved we do not have elephants.
In my time, I've lamented the absence of elephants in zoos.
Growing up in the 1970s, you saw lots of elephants in zoos.
But actually, having seen them in Botswana and Shobi, that's the place to see them, isn't it?
It is.
And of course, you know, Africa is still incredible.
Interestingly, of course, the anti-Zoo movement is very often people who is spearheaded, as you'd expect, by people of great privilege who go to Africa all the time and see these things.
They are the classic of the kind of, you know, well-heeled critics.
And I always know, you know, when we get... We get anti-zoo visitors, of course we do.
But the emails and the criticisms are always in perfect English and perfect grammar.
Yeah, there was from an estate somewhere.
No, I mean, it's going to be email.
It's going to be, it's not going to be anonymous.
It might be posted online.
It might be, um, but it's always going to, it's going to be the usual suspects and it's never going to be our core audience who are, you know, the mass market who absolutely love, you know, what we offer and what we're trying to do.
And, and they'll never be able to afford to go on safari.
And for a lot of them, you know, coming here and having a, the sort of contact with animals that they otherwise only see on TV, thanks to David Attenborough.
is, for some of them, an absolutely life-changing experience and really, really important to give them that.
Can I ask you briefly about, because we talked about big cats, am I right in thinking there are more tigers in captivity than the run of the wild?
I'm going to get this wrong, but there are some sad things in that one always hears how rare rhinos are.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, they're constantly threatened.
But now we're at the stage where lions in the wild are now rarer than rhinos.
So that's one rather sad thing to think about.
So lions are even more of a conservation priority in some ways, one could argue, than rhinos, although they both are obviously And I think the thing you're thinking about is that there are more tigers kept as pets in the United States than there are wild tigers in India.
And again, it's slightly apocryphal, but it does make a point.
Back to Tiger King.
Yeah, you wouldn't keep a tiger, would you?
We used to have tigers, and they both died of old age, age-related stuff.
And then we switched into having Asiatic lions, who are great.
Tigers in captivity, yeah, they do pretty well.
I mean, they're naturally more solitary, they're naturally more nocturnal.
And what I like about lions is that they are, of the big cats, they're the only ones that's gregarious and has the pride structure.
So you'll have a male and a female and the cubs and it looks just more, it's easier to replicate their wild society in a captive environment.
And I feel that they're having a very good quality of life.
For a large sentient being in a zoo, you know, those are things that one always has at the back of one's, at the front of one's mind as to why, you know, when you're collection planning, Can you deliver a really good quality of life to what it is that you're caring for?
That's got to be your lodestar, if you like.
And as for the eating the keeper problem, or biting their arm off, how much of that is an issue?
There was a school of thought, particularly the collections down in Kent, Howlitz and Portland, started by John Aspinall back in the 70s.
And he believed very strongly that it increased immeasurably the excitement of the captive life, it enriched their lives for the keepers to really bond with them and go in with them and all this sort of stuff.
I mean, that's fine until it's not fine, basically.
And most zoos operate on the basis that it's wonderful for human beings.
It's an incredible experience to get that close to an animal if you're like that.
The animal is not necessarily agreeing to this process.
And I personally have always felt that it's much better to give them their space and respect that, rather than impose yourself on their space, which is essentially what we're doing.
Oh, so I'm not going to be able to hug a tiger?
We're very hands-off here.
We get close to the rhinos, which I sort of make an exception for in that you want them to be quite biddable and familiar, and also by nature I would just say that in captivity they are pretty docile because they're king of the hill.
Who's going to have a go at them?
So they're confident.
And they're quite thick-skinned.
They're thick-skinned.
You want them to be familiar and at ease with their keepers.
Because if you've got a veterinary issue to deal with, you don't want them all skittish and tearing off.
You want to be able to have a good look at them.
You want them to be crate-trained in time if they're going to have to go to another zoo.
You don't want them to be freaking out whenever they see a human being.
So I've got no problem with us going to give them a scratch, apart from the fact that I absolutely love them and I love being close to them, so I'm a bit biased there.
I'm very excited.
I don't want to miss this.
You've arranged for me to do various anime-y things.
Well, there's little things, yeah.
I mean, encounters and all that sort of stuff, it's a big thing in zoos now.
It's this whole thing of rewards, experiences and all that sort of stuff.
And it's a tricky one because one has to... I do think, you know, people have got to have respect for animals and it's a real trade-off between, you know, giving people that access and giving them that excitement but also ensuring that they still understand that these are wild animals and there are conservation issues surrounding them
There are ways in which, you know, they've also just got to be respected.
So it's always a bit of a balancing act because otherwise, you know, one is vulnerable just to being described as, you know, exploiting them or going back to the days of the circus or whatever.
And there's no doubt that, you know, people did love things like the Chimpanzee Tea Party at Twycross Zoo back in the 60s.
I mean, just the crowds would go to that to see all the chimpanzees dressed up, you know.
And the old, what is it, the PGT... PG Tips, that's it, yeah.
People, absolutely.
And of course, nowadays, that's regarded as completely unacceptable.
Yeah.
And of course, it probably is.
And the animals, they might have loved it, they might have hated it, who knows?
But, you know, we have, quotes, moved on.
And I think that probably is a good thing.
Yes, there's a great cautionary tale that you should watch if you ever get a TV.
A film by Werner Herzog called Grizzly Man.
I've heard about it.
You've heard about it?
Yeah, there are legions of stories along those lines of people with inappropriate pets.
Yeah.
Well, let's go and meet some of your inappropriate pets.
Oh, let's go and meet inappropriate pets.
That'd be wonderful.
Reggie, until recently, what I wanted to buy most was a horse.
But now, I'm afraid, I kind of want a rhino.
I mean, that is great.
They are wonderful, aren't they?
They're so zen, for want of a better word.
And they're just...
The fact that they've just been around for so long and they're so big and they're just so docile and trusting and top of the heap, everything about them is good.
Yeah, they're happy in their thick skin.
Yeah, very happy.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a bit like my cat, actually.
My cat's like that.
He's a huge, he's a British Blue.
And they're very chilled.
But rhinos?
Yeah, as you say, it's what comes of being a sort of apex.
Yes, and interestingly, I mean, we don't know what's going on up there, but they're sort of, because everybody thinks of them in terms of rhinos and elephants, you know, great big things, so they're slightly bracketed with them, although of course they're very different.
And elephants are complex and endlessly studied and fascinating to zoologists.
Rhinos get less attention other than the fact that they're a conservation priority because of the poaching.
And they're slightly dismissed as myopic and rather thick, you know, because compared to elephants, they don't, they're not that complex and all the rest of it.
But like all these things, you know, there's so much going on that we don't understand.
And there's something very, very sweet about that, because they're constantly sort of underestimated.
And they're, you know, all the keepers here, everybody just loves them.
They're just the most lovely animal.
Well, how endangered are rhinos?
What's the one that... Well, you've got the five species.
So there's the Javan, the Sumatran, and the Greater One-Horned in Asia.
And the Javan and Sumatran, their numbers are really, really low, sort of 50.
And the case of the Javan one and Sumatran is 250 or 400, I can't remember.
Maybe it's the other way around.
So we're talking really small numbers.
Greater One Horned in India, I think, I'm going to say two, two and a half thousand maybe.
I might have got that wrong.
But again, heavily threatened.
Less so by poaching, more so just by being confined to smaller areas, overpopulation, all that sort of stuff.
In Assam, Nepal, places like that.
And then you've got the two African species, the white and the black.
And there's probably 25,000 whites and about 4,000 or 5,000 blacks.
But the white rhino actually is a great conservation success story in that it was more or less wiped out just over 100 years ago.
It was thought to be extinct.
And they then discovered a small relic population in an area of South Africa called Umphalozi, now part of the Kruger ecosystem.
And there was definitely less than 100 left, and possibly less than 50 left.
And it's actually from that founder population of just over 100 years ago that we now have over 25,000.
So it's actually, I mean, it's not really publicized because, you know, They are under pressure again in the wild.
But white rhinos are a huge conservation success story and show what can be done from a very low base.
So there's always reasons to be cheerful.
Yeah.
But I mean they are under pressure again because of the risk reward ratio has moved back in favor of the poacher.
Yeah.
Because of the success of the protection that's gone on over the last hundred years.
Well, until the Chinese stop thinking that rhino horn's an aphrodisiac.
Well, there, there, it's actually, I'm told it's actually only the Gujarati, in Gujarat in India, areas of India, where it historically has had aphrodisiac, is regarded as having aphrodisiac properties.
Chinese medicine has loads of applications.
And I'm, I think I'm right in saying that The aphrodisiacs is pretty way down the list.
So it's good for everything else.
It's good.
I mean, in Vietnam, there was some Vietnam cabinet minister who went online saying, it's cured my cancer.
Yeah.
So that was a big help.
Yeah.
Huge.
And Vietnam's a real entrepreneur.
And of course, you know, a lot of these countries where a lot of the rhino range states aren't really functioning.
And so smuggling and corruption and all the rest of it, it's a tricky one.
One of the things I really like about this place, having had a look around now, is that you haven't got that horrible preachy quality that I find in a lot of zoos these days.
London Zoo, for example, I don't know how long it's been there.
You go there and there's a thing saying, world's most dangerous animal.
And there's a mirror.
Hello, it's you.
You are the world's most dangerous animal.
I sort of get their point.
We talked earlier about zoologists.
There is something about, like, so worthy that you miss out on the enjoyment of the actual animals.
Yes, I mean, I think, I go to a lot of zoos and I've definitely noticed over the last sort of 20, 25 years, the ones, particularly the ones that are not-for-profit, the charity ones, of course, you know, they've got trustees, they've got
They've got obligations to fulfill and very much one of those is education and all this sort of stuff and they do take it literally and you go in there and the whole place is just full of signs telling you how to lead your life and I do find that very distracting when essentially what we're just trying to give people here is a nice day out and if they can just have a lovely day out and just on a subliminal level
Just feel that animals and nature and the trees and the gardens, because they're lovely too, are beautiful and lovely and just laid on here for us.
That's telling you something.
It's telling you that you're in charge.
You as the visitor.
This is all for you.
This is nature.
It's all for you.
But it all comes back to you to look after it.
It doesn't happen by mistake, and it's not going to last unless you take something away with you from your day here today.
But that's not spelt out, but you just hope people might take that away with them.
Yeah.
Well, there's been a shift, hasn't there?
Are you familiar with the work of Julian Simon, an economist?
He was known as the Doom Slayer because he was famous for pouring cold water all over the kind of we're all doomed theories.
And he said, look, actually, Peacock is a nonsense and there are actually quite a lot of resources.
They're not going to run out imminently but one of the points he made was that if you look at at biological Textbooks to do with animals you find a shift in the thinking in early ones early 20th century say you find the Animals are considered in the round, and they're used to mankind and the relationship of man with the animals.
In later ones, man is this bad actor, this guilty person.
I think so much of environmentalism, obviously, but anything to do with animals, is now infused with this thing, we are not worthy, we are evil.
I'm not sure that works.
I'm so out of touch, unfortunately, not having a telly or anything like that.
I'm very out of touch with how it's all presented nowadays.
You should watch some David Attenborough.
- Well, I mean, David Attenborough, I mean, we've had, I think it's incredible how well informed everybody is now when they come around the wildlife park compared to 25 years ago.
And I do think that he's been an unbelievable force for good, from our point of view, because he's made people interested in wildlife and animals.
And the photography, of course, apparently nowadays is just leaps and bounds from what it was when I was living in Africa and working with these wildlife photographers.
And so I think we owe him a lot and of course he's so fantastic too because he's I mean just to go back to the thing of you know humans being the menace he's actually one of the very few people who's really repeatedly nails The big issue facing us all, which is overpopulation and population control.
He's the only person, because he is a demigod and just so revered, even the BBC can't stop him from pointing out that the biggest problem that we face, in conservation terms and as a race, one of the biggest problems is population control.
Well, it's a habitat loss, I suppose.
Habitat loss is as a result of population.
If only we could get the population under control in some of these countries, a lot of those problems would go away, including all the environmental degradation and all the rest of it.
But it all follows from that.
And he is absolutely spot on on that.
But he's one of very few people who are actually constantly making that point.
But he's a bit preachy.
He's turned them into lectures on global warming and stuff like that.
He's got an agenda.
I have to say, just by virtue of the fact that he is repeatedly going on about population control and no one else dares go there because it's
Regarded as patronizing and then from there it becomes racist but no one else is doing that but no one they won't no one holds him up for that because He's a because he's right and B because he is who he is and that's we need to be grateful for that And he tells it like it is Yes, he of course he's very he's seen huge changes in the wild and all the rest of it but he's isolated population is I think the key factor and
I've got to ask you, because there were stories during the rounds about how we've had a series of lockdowns, which must have hammered your business.
Yeah, it's not what we wanted in our 50th anniversary, but we're all still here.
Yeah.
Is it true that animals in zoos are missing humans?
I don't know.
There's been a lot of special pleading by zoos and some of them really have hit the financial buffers as a result because that's their business model.
And one of the things was, you know, the animals want us back and all the rest of it.
I think if you ask the keepers here, I don't think they'd struggle to find much evidence for that.
There's a few things that we might have bred in the tropical house, where you went into the tropical house, I think.
Possibly, because that's been totally undisturbed for six months and we've had a couple of breeding successes in there that maybe we wouldn't have had if there'd been people walking through.
but animals are pretty adaptable and our visitors touch wood are really great.
They don't trash the place or mock the animals or that sort of stuff.
I really don't get why places like yours haven't been allowed to remain open.
I mean, given that you're outdoors most of the time.
I mean, James, I should be getting you started probably on the anomalies and the inconsistencies in lockdown because I have been burying my head in the sand.
I totally agree.
Down the road, there's a beautiful arboretum They're smaller than this place for the public to walk around, and you stay on paths.
They're not nearly in the amount of space that we've got, and they're open, having a great time.
Good for them, I'm absolutely thrilled.
More than one of my colleagues in the zoo world feel that there must be somebody in the civil service or government who's actually anti-zoo.
For us to be swept up in this is crazy, but there you go.
Well, that wouldn't surprise me.
Before we go, the other thing I was very interested in you saying, which I've noticed as well, is that, I think you mentioned it in the first part, the way that these particularly big game conservation charities are run by these kind of trustafarians and people with lots and lots of money,
who don't really understand that ordinary people... Yes, I was really thinking more about the anti-zoo movement, which has always struck me as... and has done some great things over the years, by the way, but like a lot of the charities... Well, I mean, they've got rid of, you know, they have targeted a lot of
Zoos in the continent particularly that were pretty barbaric and there's yeah, there's plenty of bad practice out there and has been in the past in terms of the conditions in which animals are kept and You know, there's a huge amount of compliance that we are now part of we have to observe that wasn't there 30 years ago that is a good thing from a welfare perspective and a lot of that has come by
These charities, people like Born Free, Springs to Mind, there's other ones as well, and a lot of what they've done is good, but like a lot of charities that sort of make headway and achieve their aims, But in order to keep the show on the road, they keep chiseling it away at the next thing.
Having achieved the stuff that we can all agree on, they then have to become slightly more extreme, slightly more driven by ideology, less reasonable.
Yes.
And from my point of view, less relevant, to be honest.
But still they need the money coming in.
Some of them, as I say, do do good stuff, but a lot of the targets are pretty small and pretty meaningless.
And it always amuses me that so many of the most vocal anti-zoo people are people who can afford to go off on safari and all the rest of it, whereas the vast majority of our visitors will never have that privilege.
And it is a real privilege, but it's really expensive.
And for the vast majority of our visitors, the closest they will get to a rhino or a primate or the birds or the penguins is only ever going to be, and there is nothing like it, there is nothing like getting that close to penguins.
You were closer than our visitors, but only just.
I mean, there's a two-foot wall separating them.
And it's amazing to look at these things and see them porpoising in the water and see how incredibly at one they are with their environment.
But how extraordinary they are.
How mad looking they are.
And different.
And it's hopefully a short step from that to people going away thinking, gosh, I wonder what's happening to them in the wild.
And maybe getting a little bit engaged in conservation issues or whatever.
But to take that away from people, to close these places, would then just only mean that the Poshos would never get to see animals in the flesh, because they're the only ones who could afford it.
And that would be a huge loss.
So if people want to come and find this place, people will be in America.
Watching this.
Really?
I think so, yeah, and Australia.
We get views all over the world.
Yeah, I mean, everything goes global nowadays.
So how do they... I suppose they just Google you, don't they?
They just Google us, like everybody else.
Cotswold Wildlife Park.
Yeah, Cotswold Wildlife Park.
I mean, the crazy thing is, what with social spacing and the times we're living in at the moment, we're actually limiting visitor numbers during the busy times.
And in many ways that's been quite a learning curve and not without its advantages in that we're not having really crowded, pressured days.
It's not something we'll keep doing.
We'd love to look forward to the day when we can just throw the doors open and everybody can enjoy this place because there's still a lot of aspects of it that we're having to keep closed.
In spite of that, it was absolutely incredible how when we did reopen back in the middle of June it was, after the first lockdown, people just poured in and absolutely loved it.
And there is, I think possibly because of lockdown, the fact that a lot of us aren't going to be going on holiday so much or we're going to be exploring locally.
There was a real feeling of joy at connection with nature.
And that's across everybody.
We had so many really touching scenes of families meeting up for a picnic, who obviously hadn't seen each other for a bit.
And that was just going, because we're quite centrally located in the country.
Yeah, you are.
You're well located.
So you'd have a lot of people meeting up in the car park and hadn't seen each other for a long time, family groups mainly.
And you'd look out on that picnic lawn, all the lawns are all around here, and during the summer it was just full of big groups having picnics.
And I'd like to think that, you know, last year, particularly in lockdown, because of the weird circumstances in which we found ourselves, given that a lot of people won't have had proper holidays or won't have had that trip abroad that they treat themselves to or whatever, actually they'll look back on this year and one of their big days, one of their red-letter days, will have been the family picnic or the family day out of the Cotswold Wildlife Park.
And that's a good thing.
That's lovely.
You have got the best job in the world.
I hope.
You're a bringer of happiness, Reggie.
Thank you for bringing me happiness and bringing Dick happiness.
We loved it.
Brilliant.
Rhinos and penguins, as I told you, Ruskin always famously, the Victorian art critic, if he had a bad day at the office he used to go off to the British Museum where they used to keep, I think it was either the Natural History Museum or the British Museum, they used to have a group of penguins.
Did they?
And he used to go down, he used to go just to see the penguins, just to watch them, because he would just be completely restored by them.
And he wrote in his diaries, famously diaries, he wrote kind of this, he just said, it's impossible to get angry with a penguin.
And everybody needs a penguin in their life.
Okay, so I'm going to get a rhino and a colony of penguins.
I think we discovered... Oh, that's right.
A colony on land and a raft when they're in the water.
We discovered something new.
There we go.
You've learned something, haven't you, dear listener?
So, thank you, Reggie.
Pleasure.
Thank you, Shane.
That was really good fun.
Excellent.
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