David Attenborough is the global face of natural history (Picture: Rex)

David Attenborough tells Metro why he finds all animals intoxicating – but doesn’t necessarily love them all.

The first show in your new series, Natural Curiosities, is about chameleons. They’re quite scary, aren’t they? With the toe thing. And the tongue thing. Scary? No, they’re fabulous. I don’t like rats but there’s not much else I don’t like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they’re loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance and I’ve had them leap out of a lavatory while I’ve been sitting on it. This was in India. Suddenly you’ve got Delhi belly and you’re sitting there and all of a sudden [jumps]. Not good.



Have you ever been bitten or stung by anything? I’ve been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: ‘Oh, it’s not poisonous…’ Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals. If a king cobra came in this room now, 9ft long and rearing up to 6ft tall with a bite that means certain death and it can move much faster than you can and is not afraid of human beings and is known to attack without provocation… Yeah, I’d be on that table in a shot.

What about irrational fears or phobias? I never go: ‘Uuuurgh.’ I might go: ‘That’s extraordinary. How does it survive? Why is it here? Why did the dear Lord create that?’


But you don’t believe the dear Lord created it anyway, do you? Hasn’t that got you into trouble with the people who don’t believe in evolution? Not in this country. You get letters but it’s a very easy thing to answer. Someone says: ‘I believe a God of infinite mercy created every single species and the Lord looks after us and all the animals.’ Well, what about that little African boy, five years old, sitting on the banks of a river, and he’s got a worm in his eye that’s going to turn him blind in three years? Did this God that you talk about actually design this worm and say: ‘I’ll put it in this boy’s eye?’ To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t believe that.

He’s supposed to believe it, though, isn’t he? Absolutely not! If you said to the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Are you really telling me that God got some mud, blew in it and made a man and when that man said: “I haven’t got a friend”, he took out one of his ribs, rubbed it in his hands and went “boom, boom”?’ [Rowan] Williams [the last Archbishop of Canterbury] is a highly civilised, educated man. He wouldn’t for a microsecond be so silly as to believe that. But it does put him in an intolerable position.



I’ve read you’re not an animal lover… I’m not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pat them, but I am intoxicated by animals.

Do you have pets? I used to have lots. Gibbons, chimpanzees, chameleons, snakes, hummingbirds, lemurs…

Your house must have smelt horrible. Wonderful! I had a breeding colony of bush babies. They’re supposed to be very difficult to breed but the problem is that people used to keep them in very clean conditions. The thing about a bush baby is that the male establishes its territory by peeing on his hands and putting it all on the walls. And after you’ve had a pair for about six months, you can see people coming into the house, sniffing and going: ‘Now, that’s definitely not mulligatawny soup.’

How were your kids with the animals? No phobias? No, we never had a phobia in the house. You can’t catch them.

But monkeys are scary, aren’t they? They’re like very badly behaved people. Yes, they are. You shouldn’t have them, really. The only reason we had them – and that whole list – was that it was a time I was collecting animals for London Zoo. I came back with 150 animals of one sort or another and the zoo would take some of them but some would stick at home. But I didn’t keep the monkeys for very long.

When you see that sort of intelligence in animals, doesn’t that make you want to be vegetarian? No. If you understand about the natural world, we’re a part of the system and you can’t feed lions grass.

But because we have the intelligence to choose… But we haven’t got the gut to allow us to be totally vegetarian for a start. You can tell by the shape of our guts and the shape of our teeth that we evolved to be omnivores. We aren’t carnivores like lions but neither are we elephants.


Was there an animal your wife wouldn’t have in the house? Me! No, she was a very tolerant woman.

David Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities starts on Eden today at 8pm.