Filming animals fight: ‘You are there as a privileged observer’

Doug Allan has travelled the world filming wildlife, often with legendary nature documentarian Sir David Attenborough.

When the crew is observing a fight between predator and prey, he says, every effort is made to let nature take its course.

“It might be the best ending in the world for the animal to somehow escape, especially if you’ve built up empathy from the way it’s edited. But some animals eat other animals in order to make a living, and as such, you shouldn’t interfere… You are there as a privileged observer,” Allan tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

After getting a degree in marine biology, Allan was working as a deep-sea diver in the Antarctic when Sir David Attenborough turned up with a BBC film crew.

On the side, Allan had started taking still photos of the local wildlife and while giving Attenborough and his crew a tour of places to view animals, he got to see that they were “great fun.”

“They all took the job seriously, but at the same time, they had great respect for each other. No big egos involved. It was just so hopelessly romantic. I thought, boy, what a job. Who wouldn’t want to get into that profession?”

Although he’d never picked up a movie camera before, Allan thought it was something he could learn to do. The next time he went to the Antarctic as a diver, he took a movie camera, filmed some emperor penguins, and sold the footage to the BBC.

“That was it. I was off on a freelance full-time career as a wildlife cameraman.”

Of all the animals Allan has interacted with in the wild, he says the most exciting encounters have been with are polar bears – very clever although on the ice with them you are “potentially a prey item” – and beluga whales – who’ll swim close if you make yourself “acoustically interesting”.

Both polar bears and whales – as well as dogs and horses- are our fellow mammals, and when asked Allan names our warm-blooded vertebrate group his “favourite animal”.

While protecting ourselves and our fellow mammals against the effects of climate change will be an “uphill battle”, the 75-year-old says, we can all do “small random acts of kindness” to support the natural environment.

“We can do lots of acts of kindness, not necessarily random, but thoughtful acts of kindness for the planet. That comes down to choosing where you get your electricity from, making sure it’s a renewable supplier. Where is your money in the bank? Is it with an ethical bank, which doesn’t take your money and invest in fossil fuels? It can come down to what kind of car you own, where you go on holiday, a whole lot of things.”

Thanks to human effort, things are changing, Allan says, and predictions for temperature increase are much lower today than they were 10 years ago.

“The big change is the renewable transformation that’s happening around the world. That is having a big effect. And if we carry on doing that, then the damage will not be as bad as it might be if we did nothing.”

Doug Allan is currently taking his Life Behind The Lens tour around the South Island, giving talks in Glenorchy, Wānaka, Queenstown, Blenheim, Kaikōura, Dunedin, Christchurch and Te Anau.