My Wild Life by Simon Cowell

Author:Simon Cowell [Cowell, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782435228
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gunslinger

EVENTUALLY THE WILDLIFE SOS series made a seamless move from Channel Five to the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and was shown across the world. There was no shortage of animal stories. There are plenty of people out there who, although good natured, are slightly nuts and will happily call me out on a wild goose chase. Often the old and confused make a beeline for us and some situations repeated themselves year after year. For example, every January calls come in about wild animals in distress, howling and screeching in gardens and parks. The volunteers or I have to explain to the caller that the noises were foxes and they were far from distressed because January and February is fox-mating season. They were, in fact, having a lovely time and the last thing they needed was a wildlife rescuer arriving on the scene and spoiling the fun.

One of my favourite ever calls came from a woman who phoned in with a fox emergency.

‘Some horrible person has glued two foxes together and they are in an awful lot of pain,’ she explained.

I asked her the details and she told me that they were joined backend to backend and had been running around together for around an hour. Whenever one went to run away, the other was dragged along with it howling in pain.

‘How could people be so horrible to animals?’ she exclaimed.

I was smiling on the other end of the line, not because I took any pleasure in the thought of an animal in discomfort but because I knew what had happened.

‘You don’t have to worry,’ I told her calmly. ‘It is mating season and it sounds to me that they have been a little too vigorous in their activity. The male is stuck.’

I could sense her face reddening as I explained tactfully that foxes and dogs are prone to a situation called ‘dog locking’, which happens during mating when the male’s swollen penis gets stuck inside the female. I can only imagine how painful that must be for the male and how inconvenient for the female but the best thing to do in the situation is to let nature take its course.

We are not always able to solve problems over the telephone, however, and sometimes questionable call-outs get through the system. Jim and I attended one such ‘emergency’ soon after he started when an elderly lady called in because a bird was trapped in her loft. Loft rescues always provided good footage because I hated heights and I hated climbing up ladders. There was also the real prospect that at some point, if I was bounding around in someone’s loft, I might fall through the ceiling, which would have added to our tally on It’ll Be Alright on the Night.

When we arrived at the house the lady explained that she could hear the bird chirping loudly and that it had done so all the previous night, keeping her awake. As she showed us up the stairs and onto the landing I could indeed hear a loud noise, but it wasn’t a bird.

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