Sunday, May 19, 2013

Leopards: 21st Century Cats, BBC One, review

Jake Wallis Simons reviews Leopards: 21st Century Cats on BBC One, and discovers what causes the animals to 'go rogue'.

3 out of 5 stars
A leopard at the Junnar Wildlife SOS rescue centre in India Photo: Icon Films/Laura Coates
Did you know that there are around 14,000 big cats living in India today, often within metres of humans? Did you know that Mumbai is infested with them? And did you know that in some districts they are afraid of humans, while in others they have mysteriously become man-eaters?
If the answer to the above is no, you must have missed Leopards: 21st Century Cats (Friday, BBC Two). I didn’t. I was gripped.
The presenter, the wonderfully named Romulus Whitaker, one of India’s leading conservationists, kicked things off by relating the tale of how his dog was dragged off and killed by a leopard at his home in southern India. From there he went on the hunt, travelling across India to try to work out why some leopards turn bad.
At one point, he tested the tameness of a leopard by advancing, unarmed and in full view, until he was within metres of the animal. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Attenborough.
The final 20 minutes of the documentary had rather too much Blair Witch nightscope footage for my liking. And at times it was rather hammy, what with the overblown accounts of leopard encounters and repeated shots of the clouds passing in front of the moon. Romulus’s conclusion, however – that leopards go rogue when they are “messed with” by man, and that with a bit more tolerance, inter-species coexistence is possible – was compelling.

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