Chris Packham at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

oh good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is Ruth swish it's my very great pleasure to be cheering this event at their International Book Festival and not least to say and I shouldn't be saying this at this stage not least is I'm a groupie of the guests but there you go it's a IIIi thought the practice was to set your guests at ease that was what I was trained to do anyway I think I'll just start all over again yeah it's probably fair to note too that this particular guest has written a memoir which is somewhat out of the ordinary or is a reviewer and and reviewed by the way we describe myself as an eps well friend and colleague booted em this book does absolutely immerse the reader in the savage intensity of nature and it's the writers internal world it just feels more like a forcible ducking than a wild swim well I have to report too much enjoying this for ducking even if occasionally rather like watching a spring watch you have to read it through your fingers alongside his many TV incarnations he's a Doty campaigner and a huge range of issues from shooting wild birds - population control he said managed from time to time to a ruffle quite a lot of fur and feathers and most notably among panda and cat lovers and he's currently engaged in a war of words with Ian Botham over the management of grouse loose and the very suspicious disappearance of some tagged raptors he's been on his own admission as sometimes troubled soul whose childhood was littered with nature-inspired obsessions from the life and death of a very beloved Kestrel - otters bats and dinosaurs his parents who I think sometimes get a bit of a tougher up and in in this book and nevertheless seemed to cope pretty admirably with a son who swallowed tadpoles collected badger poo kept skulls from roadkill in bedroom drawers I once memorably boiled a dead snake in a much-loved soup pot all true all the everyday work of a young naturalist you must be the only University student in the history of academia who only missed one lecture through illness because usually as we know it's the other way around so ladies and gentleman please welcome the extrordinary force of nature that's Chris Packham I think Chris if we me we should go back to that childhood when you make a a very fulsome acknowledgment to your father in particular by both parents in the acknowledgement section of the book but you were not a difficult child and I don't mean that's to pejoratively a strange child with a number of serial obsessions and that must have been quite difficult for both your folks and your sister to cope with yeah I think it probably was with the benefit of hindsight of course it that that's certainly the case but it's growing up in the 1960s and 70s I can only presume that my parents thought I was relatively normal they did tire by the time I was in my early teens of my obsessions I remember them leaving the table and starting to do the washing up before I'd finished telling them about some intricacy of the tawny owls gut and my sister certainly gave up on Natural History studies when she was aged about ten I suppose I drove that interest from her so madama Nate that the dinner table with my obsessions there was no question of that but might at the same time my parents were hugely encouraging my father has an intense desire or had and maintains it actually an intense desire to impart knowledge he read prodigiously and he I was taught to read with a set of and type encyclopedias we started at I finished it said and then he tested tested me on everything you know and I'm very grateful for that it was intense it was strange I suppose but I know when the Battle of Crecy was and when about my acting course and well everything else should be grateful that you didn't be the attorney I was guts before they start either Moo yeah yeah well there was one occasion when I was at university that I've begun a series of experiments with common shrews looking at their foraging capacity whether they foraged optimally or not in terms of their energy expenditure and given that these animals are small and have a high metabolic rate the prediction was that they would make very careful and quick choices about which food they handled ate and so in order to get them to to feed instantaneously you had to make them hungry but not starve and in the case of a small man more like a shrew that's a very fine balance and my mother was always late with the Christmas dinner so it would be meant to be served at 1:00 and then two would be enough for her and so I tried to time my Shrew experiment on Christmas Day to to be immediately after dinner but my mum was running late and of course you can't wait for a shrew so the entire table was cleaned of all of the accoutrements and the Holly and everything out at all the crackers and the Shrew test chamber was put there and I conducted my Shrew test before we had Christmas dinner so the adjective strange wasn't so in that person well the shrews behaved admirably and they chose exactly the right food and I got a good mark in that essay so that was good it'll always work yeah I was always well and my parents were very very keen that I should progress academically from a very young age although I disappointed them initially because I wasn't able to focus on things which interested me but as soon as I was able to focus on the things that I was passionate about then it thinks when went more smoothly but I mean I'm despite these little local difficulties with the Christmas dinner etc I mean they did seem to spend a prodigious amount of time taking you to the zoo to galleries to a number of you know externally you'd quite a rich and varied life they are very grateful for that as well of course so yes although I tried to get them to take either the zoo every single day my mother would take me to art galleries I have a great interest in art and I very much enjoy that she did also take me to the Opera I have absolutely no interest in the awful war so perhaps I'm so some things work some things didn't and I think again I've tried to offer that to my stepdaughter we went to all of those places and I think you know you cut these things out for your kids and they latch onto some of them they don't others and you can't make that choice for them and my parents never did try to force me in any particular direction but I'm grateful for the enormous amount of energy that they put into my education they they were very much of the mind that I went to school to do the basics but I came home to put the icing on the cake I think it might be a useful woman to tell the audience why it was that during your author period if I can put it like that you weren't able to watch the film of the authors which was taken at the zoo yes well I had an obsession with otters which the first book I've read myself although I'd had assistance because I was quite young was wing a bright water and I became instantaneously fixated on otters and needless to say I wanted a pet water and my mother made me a hideous fluffy toy facsimile of an otter which that the vision of which haunts me to this day it was like an incarnation from some bizarre which-which craft event who knows a voodoo doll of an otter never less she knows yes it was a very nice gesture it was a phone I was my birthday present but both my sister and I can barely bring ourselves to think about it was it was grotesque but anyway and at that point in time I was growing up in Southampton and Southampton Zoo had a very small zoo and I had no otters so I had the usual wrote to London Zoo and they replied to say yes they had European autumn and I was absolutely enthralled and I eventually managed to get my parents to take me to the zoo we had been before but obviously a repeat visit to see the otters we got to the zoo and it was the usual crowded day and I got to the autumn enclosure though and there was no activity and at that stage I was still impatient I thought that you'd turn up at every enclosure and the animals would be parading but they weren't and then eventually I returned to the autumn enclosure and the otters were very active they were very very active they were chasing each other around there's a lot of sound I was absolutely enthralled I was so excited and my father and I were there he was making a super 8 film my mother reappeared with my sister and immediately put pay to the situation so we must leave instantaneously the otter we must leave the otters I was completely perplexed and and infuriated you know but come all this way to enjoy these animals they were performing great stunts and they were gone and of course I thought great for my father's recorded this with his priceless super 8 camera and we'll get to see it and I'll be able to revel in this future weeks but apparently the film didn't come out and then years and years later when I was a teenager I was rummaging under the stairs in the cupboard and I found the old projector with long since given up on the super 8 and I found some films and I was projecting them in my bedroom on the floor and the low and behold the film with the otters was there and it had come out and what was displayed on the screen with two otters mating furiously I mean very furiously fervently my mother was distressed that I was paying too much attention to the copulatory behaviors of the the Lutron's there's got to be pony magazines under the bed though hasn't it yeah I suppose so but I did used to read well there were not pornographic magazines but the that the ethnological of equivalent so I was you mean you were interested in birds I was interested in birds from very young age but they had feathers and so I did always have a torch under my pillow for reading under the blankets when my parents have said it was lights out you know because they didn't understand I didn't need to sleep as long as they did so I was always flattening the batteries I must have been one of the only young boys however who was desperate to see movie news bTW but not for a quail wolf yeah I was all about the dinosaurs I was obsessed I remain obsessed with dinosaurs they're the most exciting animals of all because they're extinct and therefore we can only really imagine what they're like we've learned a tremendous amount obviously in my lifetime about my favorite dinosaur t-rex Evelyn's favorite dinosaur and it's been you know in tremendously reformed as an animal what we know of its behaviour its anatomy everything but I yeah I was obsessed with Dinosaurs at that point and I saw the poster and I was forbidden from seeing the film because I'd obviously rock her well she's you know doe skin bikini had no interest for me but my parents imagined the film in the film it'd be ripped off by a turret around on or something and it would I'd be heading in the wrong direction not towards paleontology but towards pornography as you say so I wasn't allowed to say it and eventually eventually I got say it was tremendously disappointed it was incredibly inaccurate they had the wrong dinosaur some long period there were humans fighting dinosaurs who had giant spiders and turtles it was utter rubbish yes well the problem think the thing was that in the interim period for that time I was forbidden to see it I had aged a couple of years and when I did see I had no interest in the dinosaurs but my goodness me Wakko wow she's played good friend what a formidable thing that was you know can we just paint a picture for the audience at this stage let's see from the years from I don't know of seven to twelve or whatever I paint a picture of your bedroom when an average D I was packed walls covered in posters of the Apollo moon race and all of that I was really into space as everywhere all the kids were bazoom at that time and lots of posters aidid posters of birds and butterflies which I'd tick things off and and stuff and then I had all my collections of skulls all of the clothes had been pretty much removed from my chest of drawers and they've been filled with my squad room of Airfix Spitfires me-109 semi 262s all that sort of stuff so yeah and I've still got them they live in shoeboxes now in my garage and and then lots of skulls and and tanks at one stage the entire bedroom was lined full of tanks full of reptiles had snakes and lizards and all sorts of things particularly we had some things called taka geckos I'm not sure if they've got them at the zoo but there were large got gecko species quite large head and when they bite they hang on that's my father learned and they were frequently escaping and we'd have to try and catch them but it's quite difficult to catch a gecko because they can run up the wall across the ceiling it was it took great joy and watching my father trying to catch up taka a gecko and then when he did it latching on to his finger for about 15 minutes it was great I think there are no volunteers to clear your bedroom intensity now I had to clean it myself my mother would sort of come in occasionally and inspect it and trace the Flies out and yeah that no it's down to me to clean it up I was always one for meticulous order so everything was always catchy popular yeah so the the bedroom actually wasn't untidy it was always everything was stored and ordered in every way shape or form so they didn't know it wasn't it I mean you had you had everything listed as to when it was when it was when it was caught or there we do where you got it data yep nice and you're one of the few people I know who on finding a dead bird in the gutter is excited because that means that you can see how its feathers work properly I like dead birds I still like dead birds to this day on it's a paradox of couldn't decipher them alive very obviously but when I find a dead bird particular species that I've not seen before in the hand it's always very exciting you know you can look at aspects of its Anatomy that you can never see in the field and to me it was always about trying to understand the things that I loved most more than I could by reading books and so on and so forth so that firsthand experience is invaluable and you get to know the feel and the smell and all birds smell differently and I can smell the difference between different species of dead bird and that's an asset to me I don't know what sort of asset a unique accomplishment well I don't know I mean I think it might be a compliment which is dying out I hope that there are still naturalist maybe some present today who again will pick up dead birds and smell them and and and investigate that I think one of the problems we face is that young people now are discouraged from doing those sorts of things the wretched hand gel comes out as soon as they touch anything dead or smelly and that sends a message out that it's dangerous and dirty which of course it isn't this is fascinating and so what I fear is there's some stage in the future you may be right and they may well be people who don't know the difference between the smell of a tawny owl and a bar now and that would be a sad loss I think yes quite different maybe sad but not tragic judging by the audience response yes you see in the book I mean I said at the beginning of this thing I have to watch Nietzsche watch or not to watch sometimes through my fingers and that's true but you you bury you quite harsh on wimps like me you see that you know people have just closed down their mind if they if they can't tune into nature and read and twinkle as it actually is that we should really just you know focus on what's happening or not not turn away no so what do you say to something that mean it can't actually I could have my finger in the remote in case there's a nasty killing in the middle of the show mm-hmm well for me you know I learned some time ago that the beauty of nature is not in an individual species you can look at a bird or a butterfly or whatever it happens to be whichever anything you're drawn to and they are obviously exquisitely beautiful far more beautiful than we humans I think that's what drew me to wildlife initially was therefore the perfection of those organisms but of course in isolation they're virtually meaningless that's like taking a note out of a stave and worshiping you know middle C it means nothing it needs to be set in the context of where it functions and therefore if you take all of these animals and put them together in in that harmony in that dynamic harmony which is constantly evolving and moving that's when those animals have become even more beautiful and the greatest beautiful beauty itself is that dynamic harmony is that community of animals held together with the complex relationships between them where they interact and part of the interaction is the fact that some kill the others and eat them so I would argue that although the process might be visceral and violent it's also part and parcel of something which is intrinsically beautiful so I can see beauty in the making of that predation that's part of a process which is the ill most beyond comprehension in terms of its beauty but can you understand why some people watching it might feel to see that beauty I suppose if they don't approach it in as pragmatic away as I do if you're approaching it from an emotional context and whilst I have the capacity to be incredibly emotionally attached to individual animals my Kestrel my dogs when it comes to observing other animals I don't have that emotional attachment to them I can be entirely dispassionate and so I can sit back and watch them tear each other to pieces and think in a way and forgive me that's that's a wonderful part of life because the death is a part of life and that's very much what I was exploring in the narrative of the book because obviously when you're a child grappling to understand death your own your other human or animal is is something which is which is difficult and trying to establish the context and importance of death is very much a key one of the central narrative of the book you do see in the book that it's much easier to trust animals than it is humans and also that when you were avoiding you I know you had a very difficult time at school and you were bullied and that you felt in some ways you could only trust animals you couldn't trust humans I mean have you have you emerged from that place not fully I mean if you I have an world and have always had very intense bonds with other species of animal that doesn't mean that I have haven't had bonds with humans I have but they've always been more fragile animals never lie to you they never let you down they don't seek to manipulate you well they do actually try to get food off you all the time how can I say my poodles don't try and manipulate in the owners thing even last night they managed to get an extra chew but no I think that there was a there's a purity in that relationship which you can't I can't have or haven't had in in a human relationship it doesn't mean that I don't have strong human relationships and and that they aren't equally as valuable but they are different and I suppose backed into a corner I would always say I felt more secure in my life relationships with other animals because it was the Kestrel and the time you spent with the Castro and the untimely death of the guests so that that in many ways I suppose made you wonder about the wisdom of extending love to to anything too deeply yeah but this and it did and I was terrified by the thought of ever doing it again when I lost that bird because it was the epicenter of my universe I loved it more than everything summed total and I lost it and the loss was catastrophic and in the aftermath of that I initially as perhaps many people do determine never to offer that much again because then you won't have that much to lose but of course that's a fallacy you know you must generate that much again and be and and and and somehow reconcile the fact that you will lose it I love my dogs now as much as I love that Kestrel it should scratch you by the way you're not in Kings no no they're being pampered somewhere I hope and the and and yet I have to face their their forthcoming loss and I think again part of the exploration the narrative in the book is about how it took a long time to be able to even discuss that because it was what was harsh and then people like myself do form incredibly intense relationships where pretty much nothing exists outside of that so the losses are perhaps slightly more difficult to deal with we're also not really programmed to discuss that a loss or with other people so we turned to go into ourselves and as a result sometimes we get quite seriously depressed about it you're painfully honest in the book about the difficulties you have had in interpersonal relationships the difficulties you have with you I think you said books with empathy and sympathy and and you and you go on to talk about a time when I think somebody else suggested it to you but you you matched some of your personality treats with the symptoms of Asperger's and given that you've made that journey and acknowledged that I wonder how much that impinges on your professional abilities because we see you obviously interacting in what seems like an entirely normal fashion with your co-presenters on television when difficult it was initially yeah it was very difficult I'm going to my mid-20s which was when I realized I'd have to reconcile those problems we'll try to deal with them enough until that point I've managed to initially get bullied by people and then hide away from them and and you know I did I did only miss one lecture at university but for most of the time I said 20 P piece twice a day to the bus conductor for nothing else because I didn't interact with other people at that point but then of course I got a job and a job in television which is very much a team sport and therefore in order to make it work I sat down on one of the first days that I'd started doing immediate wild show in a shabby hotel in Bristol and thought this isn't going to work unless I am able to modify my behavior just to do very simple things so that I can integrate into a working environment and make the progress that I wanted to make and initially it was exhausting it still can be exhausting there were certain things that I have to concentrate on doing or not doing as the case may be and and and I'm very fortunate I you know normally work with people who are sympathetic to that and relatively tolerant but at the same time you know I mustn't be a nuisance I have to be a hopefully a pleasure to work with so therefore I'm constantly monitoring and manipulating my behavior I'm very fortunate that obviously you know the degree of autism that I have is therefore manageable some people aren't able to manage that and very sadly in this country despite their enormous abilities only 15% of autistic people are employed what a catastrophic loss to society because you know we have skills which other pieces of society don't have and the reason that we're prevented from exercising those in the main I imagine more an expert but in the main I would imagine are pretty much social skills in other parts of the world and in certain fraternities our people have been more socially flexible and have greatly benefited from from people who have those those sorts of skills so it can work and one of the reasons why I'm happy to talk about it openly is that I hope that we'll see a change when I grew up such conditions weren't diagnosable it wasn't in the public domain that the actual condition had been recognized many years before but it was only in the late 80s and 90s when I initially South diagnosed or my girlfriend diagnosed actually and well let you clues I imagine yes yeah yeah she was in the medical professional and said I thought you nailed that the the but at that point it was only becoming you know in it came into the public domain people were realizing it and now I think it's there and and certainly teachers educators and parents have a much greater capacity to recognize the symptoms and hopefully work creatively with perhaps young people or even older people to make sure that they can make the best out of things it just seems to me reading the book and it's like it's a cracking read but it's such a long journey you've had to make because you were a young schoolboy who would talk it obsessively about the things that interested you at the time sometimes the point of boring your parents Richard from what you see yourself and then you were in school where you know people made fun of you because of these obsessions and you had a really tough time and you felt excluded from the kind of parties and teenage stuff that other kids were doing and then you were at university and you weren't talking to anybody but the bus driver is as you pointed out so that's an you know and it sounds as if it's been enormously lonely at times and yet you see it's not because of the animals yeah I mean I think to be lonely you have to crave the attention of others I didn't want the attention mothers therefore I wasn't lonely I think isolation and loneliness are different things and the isolation was a actually looking back on it was probably the best thing at that point I didn't understand why I was different I didn't understand why I wasn't sort of allowed to join in I I was upset by that I was angry actually very angry and it took some time to begin to you know use that anger creatively and while say sometime by the time I got to sort 16 17 I realized that it was going to be there was no point in being angry with people I didn't you know need anything or want anything from them so I wanted to turn that anger into something very positive I'd still that do that today I'm angry about the way our birds of prey are treated on grouse Moor so I'm trying to turn it into something positive and so yeah but I think again by the time I got to my mid-20s I was beginning to understand the situation and then I was able to be more sort of practical about changing things and things got got better but I mean ostensibly I do that what I was doing at that dinner table the only difference is now the rather than ball for people around in three other people around a dinner table I now bore the entirely audience of screen watch so I've moved from four to three nearly three million people so by talking obsessively about what it is the the the life you laid subsequently though did have literally two moments of serious depression and in the book and you divide it up into periods about your childhood periods but your young adulthood but also periods where latterly you were in therapy for a while because of attempted suicide and you wrote about that in a way that it was quite heart-wrenching and but as I said earlier also painfully honest what what prompted you and I'm glad you did for all kinds of reasons for the other people in that situation what prompted you to put it down as to use your words but really is that we don't lie we find it hard to lie I can lie now I've learned how to do it I still find it very painful when people lie to me so when I sat down to write the book the idea of fabricating something to make it sound better for anyone is pretty alien to me really it's cheating it's unpleasant it would lead to circumstances which will upset people that's what happens to me if I get lied to I mean the thing is we're easy to lie to my partner lied to me last night about something she says that my stepdaughter was split up with her boyfriend and then immediately laughed at me because it's not this the least likely thing that's going to happen at the moment so you know it's it's just that you know it's difficult for us to read other people sometimes and therefore we are easy to be lied to we don't pick up on things like that I've tried to get better at it both last night I fell hook line and sinker for some pathetic little trite lie and so when it came to writing things down there wasn't any other way to do it and when I've made up my mind that that was the the story that I was going to tell I exercised my memory to the best of its advantage and and wrote down pretty much what happened I can't tell you it was verbatim those sessions I didn't record them but I remember them in implicit detail I'm one or two were had notes made in my in my diary but I think that the thing is that the reason that the ultimately the reason that those events occurred was because again comes down to the aspergers that during the period of time when perhaps it would have been better to communicate with other humans to better understand the condition and the events that were taking place that was not an option it was never going to happen so things got put away and never dealt with and when other events later in life occurred which basically led to all of that stuff resurfacing there was no framework no protocol to deal with it and so that as I got older and I got to a certain point when I thought I'd again I'd reached I suppose a degree of emotional or intellectual maturity well I thought okay I've got to solve this problem now because if I don't next time maybe I won't be here to solve it so it was that simple it was again a calculated decision to think I've got to understand at this point what the issues are I need to understand them so I can address them that turned out to be quite a painful process but nevertheless are successful when I hope obviously asmin entirely tested but that's hope and then and that would give me an ability to go forward and that was something that should have happened when I was 14 but there was no capacity for that to happen in 1974 or 5 you know but the first time that you contemplated suicide you you see very frankly that you you were thinking about the impact it might have another people would almost be a you know the ultimate act of vengeance for the things that made you angry but the second time and it wasn't like that at all and it was you you were almost you seemed almost content to have got to that that please well I think so I think that I mean I'm no expert on this so don't read it in any way like that but I think obviously some people go close to taking their own life because they want attention of others or they do want revenge on others that they perceive have harmed them and initially that would have been the case but I suppose that the reason it didn't happen was because I couldn't be assured of that vengeance working and and therefore it didn't happen on the subsequent occasion a couple of occasions then it could have happened because it wasn't about anyone else and people always say suicide is selfish it's not it's nonsense there was no one else there at that point in time if there were anyone else there presumably you'd feel an attachment to them and you will might therefore perceive some responsibility but there is no responsibility because there is no one else there so at that point there's nothing selfish about it at all it's merely about yourself and I felt that I was in a position whereby I'd have a sufficiently rich life to almost justify it I mean I grew up in a two-up two-down in well 3-up 3-down house in Middlebury reading book Bronte carts and I found myself in those rain forests illustrated in the cards watching those very births I can't say at any point that I haven't had an ax life of enormous riches far beyond my comprehension and at that point of time stage when I was absent evil and chronically depressed I thought okay fair deal you know I've had an ink I can't complain I have no platform for complaint whatsoever in terms of what I've been able to see and joy and counter and experience in my life thankfully the dogs were there and and and I've now enjoyed further riches so that was of a great asset to have them there did being evil finally and belatedly being able to discuss all this in such intimate detail with the therapist if you think that's killed these demons for you now I don't know I hope so obviously I think initially when the therapy finished it took some time afterwards to actually digest it all it was a relatively traumatic when you've got a lifetime not telling anyone about anything because you don't really relate to human beings in that sort of way and then you tell stranger things and you tell them the entire truth it takes a little while for you to learn the entire truth I hadn't heard that truth before I'd been hiding it so I would say that it may be it may have been a cup of the afterwards I suddenly sort of thought or felt in any I felt any empowerment having gone through that process it wasn't instantaneous not a quick fix I don't think and then in terms of writing it down was it cathartic I don't think so it for me it became a process I had an idea of the narrative I set myself I wanted to make a book wanted to make something out of words and I sat down to complete that so that wasn't people have asked did you write this as a form of catharsis certainly not not at all I wrote it because I was trying to write a good book and and and that was it and so during the process of writing it I was detached from it largely and even when I did the audiobook which I meant I had to read what I'd written which I had many times of course but that was the sort of first time I sat down and read it without tearing it to pieces and criticizing every third paragraph and comma then I sort of just psych myself up to read it and I was able to detach myself from it this some paragraphs Christic just kind of leap off the page you say yeah I mean you describe yourself as being securely unhappy but you also said something that I'm feeling quite arresting you said people's craving for stability you'd squalor rather than Sparkle to easy contentment gave them more of the excitement I gave them none so I gave them none of the excitement of a struggle against the odds none of the allure have been plagued with uncertainty or tease with the appalling option of giving up now that's almost the polar opposite of what most people would want if you're with me you know they wouldn't regard it as as not struggling they wouldn't regard that as some kind of penalty hmm yeah well III saw I would disagree then I obviously but I'm just interested as to why you think they've got a kind of if you like much less fulfilled length if they don't struggle I can't say they have a less fulfilled life I I don't know I personally would perceive it that way that I'm not entirely sure I've always shied away from any form of contentment and stability if you get near it tend to shake it up a bit and and I like the idea of struggling I like the idea of having a very determined purpose and a need to achieve things and if you I mean there's nothing more dissatisfying than the realization of your dreams and you know even on simple terms which is again there's nothing more to satisfying than the realization of your dreams what do you do next people say I take photographs I take still photographs and I'm a perfectionist and and I work really hard my ambition is to continue to improve my technique as long as I live I don't know ever imagine I should take a photograph that I'm pleased with but even today I've had emails from people I've asked them for if I can use some of their photographs per project and they've sent me up and then one of them said I've got this brilliant picture and I just think okay well if you've got a brilliant picture what are you gonna do tomorrow you know what how can you if you've got the ultimate photograph it's if it's boolean what do you do next it's not brilliant there's always room for improvement and so therefore it's a it's a bit you know it's about not giving up it's about continuing to strive to improve or to achieve what you're setting out to do and if you reach a stage where you become content and I can only imagine that with that comes lethargy and slovenly Ness and therefore you wouldn't be driven as and as passionate so if the leaflets drive is it's what brings you satisfaction over cane yes exactly right so it's I suppose it's a it's a different way of acquiring the same degree of MA I don't know what I was going to say comfort but I don't like that much either so it but it's it's about I suppose it's about going to sleep and waking up and thinking that you've still got a purpose in life and I need to wake up in the morning and think I've got something to do not that I've achieved anything you know we open campaigning as I briefly alluded to about the illegal persecution of birds of prey on grouse moors we've had a permission petition which needed to reach a hundred thousand signatures it reached it on Saturday morning about two minutes past 10:00 I'm just thinking about what I can do next I have you know that's one small milestone I hope in terms of improving the you know the the shape of our landscape and the welfare of our wildlife but that's not job done this list loads more to do so I'm just immediately that's why I was asking for photographs I'm on to the neck job I don't mean this in any kind of trade way I promise you but there's all of this that's need for striving this endless need to strive and to be better and to get better and every week does that make you quite difficult to live with um probably I think that again what I have learned to do at the expense of a number of relationships is to moderate my behavior within that relationship I think I'm very fortunate to have a partner now who largely entertains and is often amused by this sort of Asperger traits not always but in the main I'm very fortunate to have raised the stepdaughter who's grown up with it and I think there were a number of times when it might have been difficult for her but now she accepts that and laughs at it and and also has seen I hope I hope has seen some of the benefits from it the enormous energy that I put into her education hopefully might pay off and the but yeah I would say so there's probably some handicaps there but also some benefits you know we obsess we are honest we're you know we don't lie we have fully committed you know I thought of letting letting my stepdaughter my partner down is so such an anaphora to me that I would do everything I can not to do that so there are benefits to I mean the fact that they can't really move anything in my house because I'm going to put it back to exactly I come in and they've and they've sort of done that I have to sort of go like that but remind me how many cheers you her well I've got a lot of chairs that in my stepdaughter came in and the last time we were at the house thought I meant to live in and she said you know we have 29 chairs in this house Chris I'm only allowed to sit on three of them so I like chairs but they're not always to sit on some some of them are to look at no home in there I've just realized that I'm absolutely when operating it because I'm absolutely fascinated by what you're seeing but I think this times like the audience get some questions and could be other lights up and and I know there's a lot of hands up already but be really grateful if you'd wait for a microphone to come that's two in the middle there that would be quite useful to start with thank you hi close really interesting to hear what you've been saying and you mentioned earlier this afternoon uh his dynamic harmony but animals living in that really nice harmony and I just wondered what your views are on we have a think in England we've had about your cull and there's obviously a deal call in Scotland and in Scotland are talking about reintroducing hopefully the wolf and the Lynx back into that dynamic environment I just wonder what your views are on Coles generally and about reintroducing species of animals that perhaps that that dynamism isn't working anymore yeah well we live in a man scape in pretty much every part of the world now we're influencing that if we're not touching it directly where we're changing the climate which will have an influence on it so we live in a man-made world and therefore we've upset that harmony and as you say in the UK to protect the case of deer long ago we removed their natural predators links and wolf links for small deer species wolf all of the deer species and as a consequence of that in some areas we have a an overpopulation of deer and there's no doubt now and that they're damaging the environment they prevent wood and regeneration they damage the woodlands themselves they have a negative impact on wood and bird population and butterfly population all of which has been scientifically measured and published and and we therefore have a pretty good understanding of that impact so in order to maintain the richest mosaic of life and habitats we have no choice but to take matters into our own hands in the absence of those predators so culling deer is a necessity there is no doubt about that whatsoever in some parts of Scotland where the issue is quite profound people have been working to improve things and they fenced the deer out they've cold and cut the numbers and we're seeing regeneration taking place and it's we're beginning to get a healthier environment again in other parts of Scotland unfortunately that hasn't been in taking place obviously in an ideal situation we would reintroduce the absent predators but unfortunately since they've disappeared links about 800 years ago wolves last one in Scotland the 1740s allegedly and the world moved on and there are lots of roads and there are lots of people and there's lots of farm stock and if we reintroduce these animals they will have an impact on us and people are largely intolerant of animals impacting upon us our answer invariably if something has the temerity to to get in our ways to kill it and which is very disappointing so I think that in the short term the likelihood of reintroducing wolves is far flung it's a shame because it would be a very interesting experiment and we could manage it to minimize impact on humans and farm stock but I don't think we'll be allowed to do that unfortunately I think with links which have been successfully reintroduced into many European countries very successfully one or two failures but not in the main successful then there's a chance we might we might see links and that would be very very exciting but we do need to win over the hearts and minds of a certain group of people who at the moment claiming that they'll be rampaging down our precinct tearing down children and other such nonsense but it's about education as I say it's about winning hearts and minds to make that sort of progress so culling is a very much part and parcel of modern life that's what we have to do when it comes to the Badger coal while things are slightly different because I think that we should if we are going to cull animals we should base the necessity and the degree and the method on good scientific foundation research independent research and the independent research shows that by culling badgers we won't improve conditions in terms of the transmission of bovine tuberculosis so I oppose the badger cull on scientific grounds I don't oppose the deer call on scientific grounds it's very much horses for horses and sometimes we don't always have the answers immediately available to us what we do have is a skill set out there of people who we can employ to define those answers out and I think that conservation needs to be far less risk-averse we need to take a few chances and where that's been done overseas with more ambitious conservation projects is paid dividends so rewilding reintroduction of animals such as beavers and links and so on so forth have made a tremendous positive difference in the environment and also for humans to in terms of ecotourism I mean let's face it in an idealistic situation now if we did have wolves in Scotland a very popular animal in some camps and not in others of course they do polarize people's opinion but there are an enormous number of people who would spend a large amount of money to go and see them so there would be benefits to the communities as much as there would be deficits too so yeah I don't think I'll live long enough to see wolves but hopefully long enough to see links that they like I'm intrigued by the narrative structure and narrative position that you chose in the way your memoir you shift between first and third person and also write some events from the point of view of other people and that in particular really intrigued me did this come naturally or was a conscious decision to write it this way no it was it was a conscious decision at the outset I felt uncomfortable writing in the first person I don't like myself very much so writing about III sounded I mean I'm a lot more interested in other species and myself so that would have been difficult and but and although I also recognized that I had a bit of a problem in that obviously it was going to be hugely beneficial if I could exercise the benefit of hindsight but I didn't want to do that retrospectively so what I thought was if I used real people all the people in the book are real they were real characters some of them are still alive some of them are still talked to and some of them are still talking to me and I so I wanted them to do to achieve two things firstly to be able to see that time period from an adult perspective so in the 1960s I was massively into Thunderbirds I didn't really know what was going on in the pop music world or the political world or anything else I was massively into that and my my snakes and and so I it was a way of showing you know of painting a broader picture of what the world was like in in this 1960s and 70s and the second thing was that it gave me the ability to portray myself from an adult perspective without it being reckless so it wasn't me looking backwards it was them looking at me at that contemporary period of time and and describing what they saw so I think it achieved three three purposes on that account painting the scene providing a an adult perspective of a young person who can't see that at that point in time and also alleviating my discomfort from writing in the first person I chose to wrote the to write the Kestrel / the Kestrel part of the narrative which is the only piece which runs chronologically is written in the first person and I wanted to do that so that it would be immediately obvious that that was important and it was very personal and very intense and there were very other the various other pieces that I've written in the first person and those again are all very seminal parts of the narrative they're very important junctures and so I use that then as a form of that tense to to highlight that and make that hopefully apparent if if even subconsciously apparent to the reader thank you for sharing that with us Chris that was really moving and I dislike to ask do you extend the persecution of Raptors to mountain hares yeah I do mountain hares are not legally protected so it's a criminal criminal act obviously to kill any of our birds of prey it's not criminal to kill mountain hares the problem I have with the hares is the fact that on some of the estates they've been exterminated the thought is although I've been given to understand but don't quote me on this it was a conversation I've had with someone who works in that field of research but the thought is that the hares have the capacity to transmit a disease to grouse through a parasite and that as I understand the survey but don't quote me on it has yet to be proved but on that account some of the estate's have removed all of the mountain hares now obviously that is it's an appalling method of management the hares exist there because they can rather like cockroaches and rats and pigeons and everything else that we might call pests if they are there they're performing a function in that ecosystem if you take them out that ecosystem is therefore not fully functional and it may get to the point that it's not sustainable so exterminating a species to protect another it's just basically poor ecological management and therefore I am severely critical of it in terms of going out and shooting a few mountain hares for the pot in a sustainable way I'm not critical of that in any way shape or form it's not illegal so again the problem with driven very specifically driven grouse shooting not shooting or grouse shooting but driven grouse shooting which requires this high intensity management of the landscape and of the wildlife is that it's ecologically destructive it's costly to us and it's got its criminal element and that's why I've been so vigorous campaigning against it I know you don't want to revisit the whole thing with with dean bosom but but I think it'd be interesting for us to know what you think has happened to these Raptors who were being followed by satellite taking well I know exactly what's happened and they've been shot trapped or poisoned and I don't think there's any ambiguity about that I can't prove it on an individual basis because we didn't have the corpses but even that is is a sign that something nefarious has happened when your satellite tracking a bird with the technology that we have now we're able to identify where they are in the world plus or minus 50 10 15 20 meters when the tag stops working it doesn't mean that you can't then go and find it and when the researchers and the police have gone out to the areas on grouse moors where the tags have failed they've failed to find the tag which means that it's been removed so it's therefore highly likely that the birds have been poisoned trapped or shot and again the sheer abundance of birds which are disappearing on grouse moors 79% of of satellite tagged hen Harris have disappeared on grouse moors in recent years 79% have disappeared on grouse moors and Golden Eagles are disappearing very frequently white-tailed eagles on on grouse moors as well so satellite tagging is allowing us to understand the problem but unfortunately not get the prosecutions and to have the law upheld but we know exactly what's happening and so does everyone else thank you all questions if somebody on the air please thank you very much with the UK leaving the EU will that have a beneficial or a detrimental effects on wildlife well that remains to be seen but we're obviously hoping that it will be beneficial if it comes to fruition the European Union has provided us with a quite a very very good framework for protecting our landscape and the species that live there we've had the habitats directive which is European legislation which covers a huge area of the UK and within that about 70 odd species are specially protected again under UK under uu EU legislation so we have greatly benefited from from that if we leave obviously at the moment we were unclear as to what will happen with that legislation will it be renewed and we drawn and if it is renewed and redrawn from a solely UK perspective will it be as rigorous and as useful we sincerely hope that it will be but of course we're concerned that it may not be not that European legislation is is you know for proof or doesn't fail it does fail and unfortunately the EU hasn't been as rigorous as it might have and should have been in making sure that it that it was more robust so we have instances in the UK there's one a grass more Walsh or more in above Hebden Bridge which has been drained and burned and the internationally important blanket bog has been burned and this has been reported to the European Commission who are currently investigating and there's a very good chance that they may take the UK government to task for allowing this this this this landscape to be damaged so sometimes it's not really been all it's cracked up to be I mean it ideally again an idealistic Lee perhaps we would move forward and strengthen the laws to protect the environment but for some reasons and I'm sure you might imagine what they are I'm skeptical that that might take place so I think amongst all of the problems that we've got to face in conservation and care for the environment we now have another one on our hands as if we haven't got enough to do and that is chewing and trying to help implement a new set of legislation to protect the UK's wildlife and habitats which is I mean given the resources we've got again we could have done without it to be honest with you good time for one more question there's anybody over there because you've been kind of neglected yet we're in the front row here thank you Chris there's been so much in what you've said with you which I totally agree however as a veterinary surgeon I would take issue with your suggestion animals do not lie they do and the most common lie is to insist that they're okay when they're ill or injured for obvious reasons when they're wild animals but they still go on doing it when they're tame well I'd like mr. both them I would never argue with an expert so I will defer to you on that one and say that you're right and it's a it's of course a great sadness that they that they do not betray the fact that they are ill and my partner who keeps exotic animals he's frequently disturbed by the fact that one day they look fine in the next day you know they might be a bit off-color and when she investigates the reason why they are they've got a sniffle sniffle she finds that they're terminally ill and they die on the operating table having never been brought down from the anaesthetic I think the thing is that as you know I'm telling you this I'm telling the audience of course or any of the audience that aren't very surgeons the is that either to exist and to survive in the animal world the wild animal world you have to be absolutely at the top of your game and you any tiny weakness any tiny flaw and he broken feather or cracked claw will be an incapacity to you and so these animals exist on that plane of perfection until the simplest thing goes wrong and then they just fall off and and therefore they they have to in a way not consciously but they have to mask any symptoms of their FAL ability up to the point that they they just die so you're absolutely right is an observation they mask that that illness from us and that makes it tragic sometimes when we're particularly if their companion animals obviously when we take them to the vet and we think they're a little bit off-color and unfortunately you have the terrible duty of telling their owners that in fact it's a little bit more than that which is which is very sad I'm sorry well let's not end on on up but on a downbeat because you know the joy that companion animals bring us I think you know okay they lie to us but but it can be unbeaten paralleled and I think that they are capacity to enrich our lives and for us to and the ability that we have to share our lives with them on a very personal basis the relationships that we have with with with any animal is comes down to the individuals the person and that animal and they're unique and I get a tremendous amount of pleasure out of seeing other people enjoying those relationships I don't love their dog don't love that person but when I see those relationship is when I see those people together interacting with those animals it's always really reassuring and it gives me some hope that there is a significant part of our population that we can draw upon who genuinely care about the welfare of animals and therefore going forward into the future we will make more rapid progress and positive change thank you for that you

Channel: edbookfest

Views: 12,968

Rating: 4.6781611 out of 5

Keywords: Edinburgh, International, Book, Festival, Chris Packham, 2016, EIBF, literature

Id: n5jNwPOKy0I

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2016