Man & Beast
with
Martin Clunes
Martin Clunes sets out on an international journey to investigate the extraordinary
relationship between man and beast in a two-part documentary for ITV.
From birds to bears, and from pets to primates, involving ancient and modern techniques
and partnerships, Martin observes humans and animals working side by side in ways that
have existed and evolved during hundreds of millennia.
And he considers the conflicting nature of the relationship, which sees man nurture and
love beasts, which he also hunts, slaughters and eats.
His travels take him to Nepal, where he meets a farmer whose cows not only supply his
income from milk, but also provide the fuel for lighting and cooking in the family home.
At the popular tourist destination of Ko Yao Noi in South East Asia, he sees the hard
working monkeys trained to scale 100 foot trees to pick ripe coconuts.
In Japan Martin discovers Ukai, one of the oldest surviving working relationships between
man and beast, which involves harnessing the fishing skills of the cormorant, one of the
most effective hunter-gatherers of the bird world.
He tracks down the last surviving members of a tribe in northern Japan who kill wild bears
to live.
Back home Martin reflects on his own relationship with the animals on his Dorset farm. He
has a menagerie of dogs, cats, chickens and horses, as well as raising sheep and beef
cattle for market.
“All through my life I’ve been fascinated by animals. Almost every day, it seems, I acquire
more of them. My dogs have always been my constant companions. But then the horses
came along, and more recently I’ve populated the fields of my working farm in Dorset with
sheep and cattle. It’s very hard not to love them all, which I do, and therein lies my
problem.
“Every day I read some new research about animals which troubles me.
About how smart they are, and about how sensitive and sociable they can be. Even
chickens, we’re told, are possessed of significant brainpower.
To a woolly Western liberal thespian farmer like me that raises all sorts of issues: like how
can I raise an animal only to send it to a slaughterhouse?”
Martin begins his journey for the first programme in Nepal, where the cow is sacred, and
ownership symbolises wealth, strength and abundance.
In the countryside virtually every household has a cowshed. Martin meets Shubaka
Chowlagi, a farmer who supports his entire family with just eight cows.
In common with all cows in Hindu countries Shubaka’s beasts are farmed solely for dairy.
In order to work out how much he gets paid the fat content of the milk has to be assessed.
Martin cycles with Shubaka with the urns of fresh milk to see how much it is worth.
It is not just the milk production the cows are highly valued for. Shubaka’s cows produce
sufficient dung to provide his household with more than enough gas for all his cooking and
lighting needs. Even their urine is used as a pesticide on crops.
As cows are sacred in Nepal, it is illegal to kill them and it is taboo to eat them which
means most live long lives. Martin visits a shelter for elderly cows, where they are cared
for in their final years.
Martin’s travels take him onto Ko Yao Noi in South East Asia. It is a popular tourist spot,
but it also has a traditional agricultural economy work where people have to work hard to
survive.
He meets Sarawut, a hard working pigtail macaque monkey, one of the biggest and most
agile members of the monkey family. Because they live in thick dense forests they are
spectacular climbers, which makes Sarawut the ideal candidate for the job of scaling the
100 foot trees to pick coconuts.
Pigtail Macaques are so intelligent scientists have been able to train them to gather rare
botanical samples from inaccessible corners of the world.
Sarawut has been trained to pick only the ripe coconuts and once he has one in his little
hands he twists it around until it snaps off.
After training, Sarawut cost his owner Bangchit around US$500, but because he can make
his owner up to $30 a day the monkey paid for himself in less than a month.
Unfortunately the number of pigtail macaques is decreasing because their meat is
considered a delicacy. The thing that is saving them is their value as coconut pickers.
Martin goes night fishing in the Nagara River in Japan where cormorant fishermen have
worked for more than 1300 years. He meets Tetsuji Yamashita, one of only six imperial
fishermen in the world.
They go fishing at night because this is when the fish are half asleep. The light from the
braziers draws the drowsy fish up to the surface, ready for the cormorant to strike. The
cormorant can dive to a depth of 150 feet and manoeuvre at terrific speeds. Martin dines
on their catch of sweet fish at the end of the night’s work.
On Martin’s farm in Dorset he raises lamb and beef, which is sold by Frampton’s the local
butcher’s shop in Bridport. An animal lover, and meat eater, Martin says his animals have
been raised in a controlled environment like generations of domesticated animals before
them and when the time comes they are killed as humanely as possible.
“We’ve got a tiny herd of Dexter Cattle – they’re the smallest breed in Europe. They’re beef
cattle and in due course the boys will be sent for slaughter.
But that doesn’t mean that I show them any less love,” Martin says.
Killing animals bred for the table is one thing, but killing wild animals for the pot stirs up
very different emotions for Martin as he meets one of the surviving members of the ancient
Matagi tribe of northern Japan. The Matagi hunted and killed the Asian black bear partly
for their own safety, but also as a source of food.
Takashi Yoshikawa has hunted more than 150 bears in his life - 70 of which he killed
single-handed. He still hunts bears, and shows Martin the scars from his encounters.
Martin is disturbed to see two bears Takashi keeps in a cage in his backyard.
Takashi tells Martin these bears are here because he shot their mother in an act of selfdefence, not realising at the time that she had two small cubs. There are more than 15,000
Asian black bears wandering wild in Japan, and their numbers are growing. Bear attacks
on humans are not uncommon, even in towns and cities.
Takashi invites Martin to join him for a meal of bear casserole. But Martin has to politely
refuse. After seeing the two bears in a cage in Takashi’s back yard, he can’t bring himself
to eat one of their relatives.
Martin travels onto the Himilayas looking for elephants, and to learn more about the
mahout profession, which is four thousand years old and still passed on from father to son.
In the village of Sauraha where the elephant is a common sight, Martin meets Bharat who
has been a mahout for 19 years, nine of which he’s spent with his current elephant, 12
year old Rum Cali.
As her mahout, Bharat sees more of Rum Cali than his own family.
Luckily Ram Cali and her friends in Sauraha are no longer called on to work in the harsh
environment of the logging industry. Instead - they carry tourists.
On the day Martin visits Rum Cali has got the day off, so he and Bharat and I take her for
a bit of a treat - a cooling wallow in the river.
In the second programme, Martin looks at how pet ownership in Japan is scaling new
heights of intensity. For many years there have been more dogs and cats than children.
Now more than 24 million cats and dogs share the pavements of Japan’s already crowded
cities.
Martin learns the poignant story behind the statue of a dog called Hachiko in the heart of
Tokyo which symbolises just how important dogs have become here, and all over the
world.
Hachiko was an Akita, a unique Japanese breed, and every evening, when his owner
returned from work on the train, Hachiko would be waiting.
But one day the dog’s owner didn’t return, he suffered a stroke and died.
Every day for the next nine years Hachiko waited for his master at the station.
Over the years the story spread far and wide. What people admired about Hachiko was his
unending loyalty to his master, even after his death.
A statue was erected in his memory and Hachiko became the perfect expression of why
man allowed dogs into his life in the first place. In Japan today Akitas are revered –
celebrity dogs, almost.
Martin also meets the dog owners in Tokyo who treat their pets more like children. He
sees them being pampered at a canine beauticians, and dines with them at a special dog
cafe.
But the sad side of pet ownership in Japan is that more than 100,000 dogs a year end up
in the dog pound, of these 70 per cent are put down.
Martin meets a man who has dedicated his life to rehabilitating abandoned dogs and
putting them on the stage in Mr Uchida’s Super Wan Wan Dog Circus. Although he admits
to not being a lover of performing animals, Martin is full of praise for Mr Uchida and his
colleagues for rescuing the abandoned dogs. In a special performance for an audience of
schoolchildren Martin joins six dogs for a skipping session.
Martin had to overcome his dislike of snakes to meet a snake charmer in Nepal. In an
attempt to protect snakes, snake charming was banned in the 1970s. But it survives in
isolated communities like the one Martin visited.
He watched as a snake charmer coaxed the snake out of the box and holds it with what
looks like a hypnotic spell by playing his pungi or reed pipe. But the whole performance is
an illusion because the snakes are deaf, so what they really are is scared stiff, rigid with
fear.
Martin travels to Thailand to see how bulbuls, small song birds with distinctive loud and
piercing song, are used in gambling competitions to see which one will sing the loudest.
Martin visits Bangkok to see the silkworm at work for the Thai silk industry. At one of the
city’s oldest silk factories Martin is shown the complicated process, which comes at a price
for the tiny insects. After six weeks of feasting the silkworm spends three days spinning a
cocoon from around a mile of superfine silk thread produced from its salivary glands.
Once the spinning is complete the silkworm goes into hibernation, and it is at this stage
that the cocoon is harvested. The hibernating silkworms are then tipped into boiling water.
After they’ve soaked for a while its possible to start drawing out a thread - and this is how
silk has been spun for thousands of years. The little silkworms are still deep inside the
cocoons - but instead of emerging as silk moths as they would otherwise do, they are now
dead.
Back in Britain, Martin joins a group of smartly dressed men engaged in the
five hundred year old activity of swan upping on the River Thames.
Once a year, a group of specially appointed experts, led by the Queen’s Swan Marker
David Barber, travel up river checking and ringing every bird they encounter.
On the 79 mile journey from London to Oxfordshire they can expect to see anything up to a
1000 birds; a figure which hasn’t changed for more than a century, confirming that the
population remains stable.
All the information they gather is carefully logged, and an aluminium ring bearing a unique
number is clasped onto each of the young cygnet’s legs.
This ring will remain attached to the bird for the rest of its life and serves as a permanent
reminder that it belongs to the Queen.
Martin learns how horses are being used for helping autistic children. Rupert Isaacson has
devised the Horseboy Method, from which hundreds of autistic children have benefitted
from the therapeutic powers of horses.
Martin concludes: “I think mutual need and respect should form the basis of the
relationship between man and beast.
It is when those qualities are absent that things go horribly, and sometimes irreversibly
wrong.
“The world is a better place for animals, but with so many species jostling for survival
whose needs are as varied as their shapes, it does us no harm to stop and think about our
relationships with every living thing.”
Man & Beast is produced and directed by Christopher Bruce. The executive producers are
Philippa Braithwaite and Bill Jones.
A Buffalo Pictures production for ITV.
The programmes can be previewed on Ready to Air. Please register at www.readytoair.net
For further information please contact:
Naomi Phillipson
[email protected]
01273 564409/07917444524
For photos please contact:
Peter Gray
ITV Picture Publicity
[email protected]
0207 157 3046
Martin Clunes talks about his exploration of the history of man and
beast
Martin Clunes was happy to sample most things on his journey to discover the history of
man’s relationship with animals, but he had to draw the line at dining on wild bear
casserole.
He had travelled to Northern Japan to meet one of the surviving members of the ancient
Matagi tribe, which hunts and kills the Asian black bear partly for their own safety, but also
as a source of food.
“I knew it was something I would be offered. I thought I would be fine, I eat my own lambs.
But as we got there, there was something to do with the act of filming it, it was kind of
entertainment, and I didn’t want to eat a bear for fun, for entertainment.
“I will be honest, I had people like Virginia McKenna in my mind, also my involvement with
animal welfare issues and charities. So I said no. Also it didn’t look very nice. It looked like
puddle water with bones, not a nice thick brown stew as I had imagined.
“Actually the food we ate in Japan when we were filming was some of the nicest I’ve ever
had. We were in the mountains and the vegetables and river fish we had were deliciously
fresh.”
Martin admits he was also saddened to see the two wild bears that were being kept in a
cage in the man’s backyard. The man had killed the bears’ mother, not realising she had
the two cubs, and had decided to care for them rather than kill them too.
“It was sad and confusing to see the bears in a small cage. The two bears had been
orphaned and he told me he had made numerous attempts at setting the two bears free,
but they kept coming back to him. He was a very nice man, and he did care for the bears,
you could see it in his eyes.”
Martin recalls how he was once asked to carve the head of a sheep at the dining table
when he was visiting Mongolia.
“ It was a ritual for the visitor to carve the head, and give the tenderest cut to the oldest
person there, and then the sweetest, which is the ear, goes to the youngest person there,
and then I have to serve myself. It would have been rude to refuse.
“Then they pass round a bowl with the juice of the mutton has been boiled in and we all
had to drink that. Then we had fermented mare’s milk, which is alcoholic. I survived all that
without getting tummy upsets.”
Martin’s quest for the programme was to discover the many different relationships people
have with their animals.
“I am quite clear about my relationship with my animals, so I wanted to go and see other
people’s relationships with animals. I find it so interesting how we relate and can coerce
animals to do things.
“I have a number of relationships, one of which is taking animals to slaughter and another
is bringing them up for slaughter. Another is spoiling them with baskets, or hay nets.
“I am also aware there are some contradictions within that. But they don’t cancel out in my
mind.
“For instance if a ewe is struggling with a lamb I will do everything in my power to make
sure the lamb is born healthy, and wait to see if it drinks from its mother, and to see if its
mother is well, before leaving it. That is the duty of care one has in lambing. But it is all to
take it to slaughter. Yet there are other animals I show similar care to at the start of their
lives that come and live in our house, or travel in our car.
Martin’s own relationship with animals is very clear; one is as pets and one is as part of
food chain.
“The rule on the farm is don’t name the boys. We name all the cows when they are born if
they are heiffers, that is a joint family thing, the boys just get numbered.”
For an animal lover like Martin there were moments during filming he found quite shocking,
such as the elephants he met which were being used to transport tourists.
“ What I found quite shocking was the reality of a stable of elephants. When I heard of a
stable of elephants, I thought ‘I love a stable and I love elephants; what a lovely thing’.
“But the realities of stabling an elephant like that is chains. They have to back up onto their
spot and one of their legs is chained to a stake on the ground. They can move about nine
or ten metres around. But they are fed.
“They are used to transport tourists. They used to carry logs. I don’t think it involves a
similar level of coercion to logs because with logs, I think they had to be perpetually driven
because of the huge weights, whereas with the tourists it is giddy up and stop.
“The whole town was full of elephants. It was part of a national park. I didn’t see any
cruelty other than that they were wild animals with big harnesses and god knows what the
training process involves. There is a breeding programme, they are bred for service. We
heard that there was one elephant which had killed nine mahouts. They get cross and
decide enough is enough.
“There’s something a little sad about the world of the working elephant, but as somebody
said nobody is killing them for their ivory. May be generations on, like horses, horses are
happily domesticated, may be one day elephants will be. But at the moment they look like
wild animals in service. It was sad, but a joy to meet the elephant.”
Martin’s encounter with snake charmers was not a happy one. On screen he visibly recoils
as the snake appears to be looking straight at him.
“I have never warmed to snakes. I did rescue a snake once in Malaysia when we were on
holiday. It was in distress, it had got its tail stuck in the fork of a branch and was hanging
upside down, it had got tired and couldn’t get up enough. I lifted it out and out it on the
ground and it slithered off. Then someone at the hotel where we were staying told me to
be really careful because there was a really poisonous snake.
“So my fear is not because if anything that has happened to me I just can’t warm to
snakes. We show in the film that the reason the snakes react to the snake charmer is not
because of the music he is playing on his pipe - they are deaf - but because they are rigid
with fear.”
Back in Britain Martin met Rupert Isaacson, whose revolutionary horse therapy
programme has helped hundreds of autistic children
“I was very pleased to meet Rupert Isaacson. I saw the documentary he made years ago
about how he helps autistic children using horses, and that was revelatory. But to see it in
action and speak to the parents as well was amazing.”
Looking back over his travels martin concludes:
“I learnt that it does us no harm to remember that we share the planet with all these
animals and that it is a two way thing. Of course we shouldn’t be doing half the things we
are doing to animals. We could all relate more, it wouldn’t do us any harm. It wouldn’t do
our perception of ourselves and our planet any harm to remember it is not ours to
administer, but we just share it, even though we generally seem to be in charge of these
relationships.”