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Photo: Penguins are the second of “five great families” featured in Dynasties. (Supplied: BBC Earth)A film crew from the latest wildlife series fronted by David Attenborough have helped penguins escape from an icy gully, raising questions about humans intervening in nature.
Some viewers of BBC’s Dynasties celebrated the crew’s decision to come to the aid of the trapped penguins, but it seemed to run counter to the notion of people, particularly film crews, allowing nature to take its course when in the wild.
While filming Sir David’s Africa in 2013, the crew and audiences watched in pain as a baby elephant died of thirst.
Afterwards, he said he took pride in his role as an observer and nothing more, even in difficult situations.
“Of course you see really tough things, but there’s nothing you can do about them,” Sir David said.
“If you’re a film cameraman you are trained as it were to be the observer, a non-participant. That’s very important.”
‘There were so many factors’, producer says
But this situation was different, according to Dynasties executive producer Mike Gunton, who said the famous naturalist told him he would have done the same thing had he been there.
One of the female penguins was forced to leave her chick behind after dragging herself out of the ravine with the help of the film crew’s makeshift steps.
“It’s such an unusual circumstance to do this,” Mr Gunton told the BBC.
“There are lots of situations where you couldn’t and shouldn’t and wouldn’t, but I think in this situation there were so many factors.
“There were no animals going to suffer by intervening, it wasn’t dangerous, you weren’t touching the animals, and it was just felt by doing this … they had the opportunity to not have to keep slipping down the slope.”
Whether it was ethically the right decision, it meant viewers did not have to watch a whole waddle of penguins perish in the snow.
Audience ‘yelling at the TV’
Topics: animals-and-nature, documentary, television, antarctica, england
