There has been too much capybara tragedy on television recently. I’m talking about Natural World not long ago in which one of these admittedly ridiculous supersize Brazilian guinea pigs was rudely pushed into a jaguar enclosure to give the big cats some hunting practice and a kill-your-own lunch. And now this: The Secret Life of the Zoo (Channel 4), which features an unfortunate two-year-old female capybara called Lochley.
Lochley is pregnant. She has had one pup before, but sadly it died; the staff at Chester zoo are understandably nervous this time. And Lochley is not going to get much help from the father, a lazy lothario called Geff who’s about as useful at parenting as you would expect of a Geff spelled like that. (It’s OK to be a bit judgmental with animals, I think.) While Lochley goes into labour, Geff goes for a bath.
Lochley, clearly not much better suited to parenting, drops her babies out in the middle of the paddock. But somehow they survive and she’s now got four snuffly little capybaras, which admittedly are rather cute; well, they are the right size, guinea pig size, as opposed to the size of small ponies. Whoops, one of them has fallen into a water-filled ditch and has to be rescued (by a human zookeeper; its mother is incapable) before it drowns. Time to call social services?
No need. Because, one day, Lochley starts swaying and then staggering about the place before collapsing in a corner. You might suspect drink and/or drugs if she wasn’t a capybara. In fact, it’s a serious bacterial infection and, in spite of the vet’s efforts, Lochley sadly dies. Noooo! Suddenly, there are four little capybara orphans, at just a few days old. And as if that wasn’t sad/bad enough, now they have to suckle their gran. I know … imagine; eurgh!
Perhaps there’s something cheerier going on elsewhere in the zoo? Yes, tigers! Oh, but they are also in the process of being split up as a family. Kirana – who, according to her keeper, has eyes that look straight into your soul – is an excellent mother by all accounts, and has taught her three cubs how to be tigers. But now two of them, the two boys, are being taken away – one to a zoo in Wales, another to France – to make little tiglets of their own. This may be good news for endangered Sumatran tigers in general, and for their gene pool, but it is clearly not good news for Kirana, who wanders sadly around her suddenly very empty enclosure, searching for the sons she will never see again. God, it is all so sad.
Never mind, I hear there will soon be the pitter-patter of tiny hooves over with the Indonesian water buffalos. Uh-oh, though: apparently soon-to-be-mum Oana is prone to bouts of extreme anxiety during pregnancy, and this one is going to need close monitoring.
The new arrival arrives successfully, overnight, but then Oana is a little over enthusiastic with the grooming, a sure sign of postnatal anxiety. She licks it super vigorously, licking away its fur; the skin will be next, she is flaying her own baby alive with her tongue. Quick, time to step in. Zookeeping at Chester seems to involve quite a lot of social work.
How about some monkeys? They’re nice. Ah, a buffy-headed capuchin… oh, he’s repeatedly headbutting the camera. What is that about? Depression, aggression? I don’t know, but I don’t think I can take any more of this.
Extraordinary Weddings (ITV) has got to be jollier, even though I am not a big fan of weddings. I see them more like the end of something, rather than the beginning. Anyway, why are these ones extraordinary? Because of the massive sink holes life suddenly threw into the paths of these two couples. Carly fell off a wall, broke her neck, is now paralysed from there down. Nick got a type of cancer that left him blind.
Nelly and Sophie stood by them, though, took Carly and Nick respectively to be their wife and husband, to have and to hold, to push, to carry, to wheel, to lead, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health. They are extraordinary, brilliant people and it is very moving.
Amazingly, they even manage to see the positive in their situations. It could have been worse, they could have died. And Nick, who is a bit of a lad, says that though he will miss seeing Sophie, he can see an advantage in being blind. “I guess I’ll always see her as a young 25-year-old, even when she’s 80,” he says. Wahey, result!
