david attenborough africa baby elephant

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH?S new wildlife series, Africa, has amazed viewers with its revealing insights into the continent?s animals.

But this week?s episode sparked a storm when it showed the painful, lingering death of a baby elephant. Viewers demanded to know why the BBC crew didn?t step in and save the creature.

Here, the series producer explains why that wasn?t possible.

WHEN you go to Africa, you have a plan of what you want to achieve. But the subjects you?re filming ? the animals ? haven?t read the script.

The death of the baby elephant was something we hadn?t planned and it was something we could not prevent. We wished we could have but it was impossible.

Helpless ... James Honeyborne

You have to understand the scale of the problem. The year before the elephant?s death, a drought was already starting to take hold.

We saw hippos in a spring. They were thin and ill because there was no grass to eat.

A year on, there was not enough hay in the whole of Kenya to feed the animals of the Amboseli park, even for just a week.

To have fed them at all would only have prolonged their agony.

During the drought, the number of wildebeest in the park fell from 6,000 to 150. Zebras fell from 7,000 to fewer than 1,500.

It was the worst drought for 50 years and this baby elephant was far from the only one dying.

Death was all around ? and people were dying, too. This natural tragedy was so huge we were powerless to help.

We were just there to record it so the outside world could understand. Trying to intervene with that tiny elephant would have caused such stress to its mum that she might well have harmed herself trying to protect her baby.

The crew were heartbroken, as cameraman Mark Deeble explained in the making of the film.

We had to let nature take its course and, luckily, the story does have a happy ending. The rains eventually came and the mum had another chance to have babies.

In fact, after the rains returned, more than 200 baby elephants were born ? a record.

It was heart-wrenching to see the baby die. The crew were haunted by it. I can understand why our viewers were upset and thought we could have done more but I hope this helps them understand.

We are there to share the gloriousness of Africa ? the good and the bad. Drought and famine regularly occur yet we rarely see the effects on the wildlife.

That?s the sometimes sad reality of nature.

Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4737734/david-attenborough-africa-baby-elephant.html

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