Mark Smith on Tigers About The House and The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins.
One Born Every Minute, the programme about pregnancy and birth, is torture for a misanthrope like me (it just means more humans to mess things up) but Tigers About The House (BBC Two, Mon-Wed, 8pm) was a version of One Born Every Minute I could understand and love because the babies were not human, they were rare Sumatran tigers driven to near-extinction by all those damned humans being born every single minute.
As it happened, the two tiger cubs had a human as an adopted father: a keeper at Australia Zoo called Giles Clark, whose job was to hand-rear them.
This was not because the mother had died - she was fine - it was because the zoo has a policy of allowing visitors very close contact with animals and have to get them used to humans from a young age.
The question of whether this was the right approach was not examined in the programme, although they did show a clip of the mother looking OK after her cubs had been removed.
The pros and cons of zoos were also left unexplored, which left an awkward question: had the BBC
given a zoo three nights of publicity without asking it to justify what it does? Apparently so.
In the end, it was hard to judge the zoo or its staff too harshly because they were doing their best to contribute to the survival of the Sumatran tiger as well as make captivity bearable.
And it was obvious keeper Giles cared about tigers in general and the two cubs in particular, which led to some moving scenes with him in the role of worried father.
"I feel drained, emotional, excited," he said. It was One Born Every Minute with the faint smell of fur and straw in the air.
The human/animal relationship in The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins (BBC Four, 9pm) was more disturbing.
In the 1960s, a group of scientists explored the idea of inter-species communication after scientist
John Lilly became convinced dolphins could imitate human speech - and indeed in some of the clips it sounded very like one of the dolphin was saying "a, e, i, o, u".
As the research became more intense, one of the team, Margaret Howe, focused on a male dolphin called Peter, but then a loss of perspective (at best) or a kind of madness (at worst) took over.
Howe became so close to Peter she would sexually relieve him. "It was very precious, it was gentle," she said.
"It was sexual on his part, it was not sexual on mine; sensual perhaps."
Howe says she believes she was doing what was right to deal with the dolphin's urges and keep the experiment on track, but in the end the sexual episodes were not as unsettling as the scenes of the
squalid, cramped tank Peter was kept in after the end of the experiment.
The conditions were so bad one of the dolphin's keepers believes the animal committed suicide.
The episode also led Lilly to forswear and condemn the keeping of animals in captivity.
And yet 50 years later, we still do it - to dolphins, to tigers, to millions of other animals.
Can it ever be right? And if so, in what conditions? Good questions.
What a pity neither programme answered them.
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