Cat calls

At a time when the planet’s wild spaces are shrinking alarmingly, Jonathan Scott’s memoir, The Big Cat Man, has the ring a joyful ode. Presenter of the hugely popular TV series Big Cat Diary, Scott managed to devote his life to doing, as he put it so eloquently to his professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, “something with wildlife”. He chronicles his journeys through Africa, of months spent with leopards, wild dogs, wildebeest and lions, through words and evocative photographs. Stunning photographs and anecdotes describe the annual migration, and the memoir ends with a sobering trip through the Great Plains, where, not long ago, vast herds of bison migrated at a scale larger than what is seen today in Africa. Human interference changed it all, and through the memoir, one gets the sense that Scott believes African ecology may be headed in the same direction. However, he writes with deep affection for the continent he seems to have adopted as his own, writing, “there is nothing quite like the joy of becoming one with a piece of wild country, breathing it’s very essence till you are no longer an outsider looking in, but a part of the whole”.

Scott describes his early years in Africa as a sort of extended busman’s holiday — using gigs as a naturalist/guide to finance his field research on big cats, wild dogs and other compelling African fauna. His early years in Africa tell a parallel tale of life and (rather promiscuous) times in Africa before awareness about AIDS had hit home. Some anecdotes are amusing, if somewhat collegiate — like the Kenyan safari operator who impressed pretty stewardesses with his Great White Hunter act — pretending to sniff out lions that his spotter had already located. The ruse worked so well that he rarely slept alone in his tent. Others are more sobering. Scott writes about driver/guides in the camps he worked who’d hook up with “good time girls” while waiting for the butcher to give them 

good cuts of beef. Many of them succumbed to the ravages of AIDS, leaving a society in which only the very old and the very young were left. 

Scott’s account of his early years in Africa is also interesting because it was in the pre-Apartheid era. He chose to forego a lucrative study grant from the University of Pretoria after he realised the extent of the anti-black sentiment there. A secretary at the university shuddered with revulsion at the prospect of Apartheid being lifted, for it would necessitate her having to go to a cinema surrounded by black faces. Instead, he chose to start his career in Botswana as a wildlife artist and photographer.

This was a time when people didn’t really understand the need to protect wildlife, and poaching was rampant. Scott writes that in some places, indiscriminate poaching and hunting wiped out as much as 70 per cent of the wildlife. As he sank his teeth into a series of gigs as a naturalist/guide across the continent, Scott learnt how tourism could benefit wildlife conservation. When Tanzania closed its borders with Kenya in 1977, the resulting drop in tourist numbers resulted in poaching spinning out of control. Meanwhile, the Mara, established itself as a Safari destination, to the overall benefit of Kenyan wildlife.

The Big Cat Man

The memoir traces Scott’s journey, not only through the planet’s wildest spaces, but also through the dark recesses of his mind. All his life, Scott fights with the demons of his past — the death of his father and a misdiagnosed condition that had led him to suspect he was a hypochondriac. He writes that when he observed leopards — lonely creatures drawn to lonely places — he developed insight into his own personality. Occasionally, Scott falls prey to pomposity, the pitfall of all memoirs. For instance, he writes about how fidgety a client became when he realised that wildlife photography meant waiting endlessly in the hot African savannah for animals to do photogenic things. Things improved, he writes rather condescendingly, only when they were on their way to one of the plushest hotels on the Ngorongoro crater. Most of the times, however, The Big Cat Man is characterised by dry wit and self-deprecating humour. The memoir opens with the story of the time when Kike the leopard leapt atop the author’s jeep and defecated all over him and his precious cameras through an open sun roof.  Interspersed with excellent photographs (some taken by his wife, Angela, an award-winning wildlife photographer) and intimate animal sketches, The Big Cat Diary is an interesting and timely read. Scott drives home the fragility of the African wild by making a pilgrimage of sorts to America’s Great Plains, once home to the world’s most spectacular migrations. An estimated 20-30 million bison migrated across America before the white man destroyed not only the Native American way of life but also the animals that sustained it. Consequently, Native Americans lost their connectedness with nature as well as their dignity. The Serengeti faces a similar fate today, which is what makes a memoir that so lovingly documents its diminishing wildlife and indeed, its shrinking wild spaces, so important. The Native American experience offers many learnings, the most crucial being the deep emotional loss that people suffer as they lose touch with nature. Scott quotes Chief Seattle of the massive American tribe, the Nez Perce: “If the great beasts are gone, man will surely die of a great loneliness of spirit.”