Farting chimps and psycho squirrels

There was no talk of dead parrots, but plenty about killer rabbits, mad dogs, farting chimps and psycho squirrels.

Hearing about them was bad enough, but the makers went to the trouble of reconstructing attacks in which people had legs chewed, faces clawed and fingers bitten off. Cue far too many animal's-eye-views of people looking alarmed - as well they might with a squirrel clamped to their face like one of those little blighters that burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.

All very surreal. There were even a few It'll Be Alright On The Night type clips of a chimp picking a presenter's nose and Valerie Singleton taking a lion for a walk in Blue Peter.

What I didn't much like was the use the story of a woman who fell from her horse - and took two years to recover - in between the reconstructions and light-hearted bits. The aim was to show was that, despite all the suffering, she still loves horses. She was one of 45,000 people each year who land in hospital after riding accidents.

Her story sat uneasily alongside Judy Le Merchant's brush with a killer rabbit which sank its considerable teeth into her arm and wouldn't let go. No one had warned her, as vet Trude Moste did us, that rabbits are "the lager louts of the animal world" whose idea of a good time is to fight with another rabbit. Some 4,000 people a year end up in casualty because of rabbits.

Debbie Warren relived suffering serious wounds after being attacked by two stray dogs. There are 100,000 dogs on the loose in the country, that's one for every 500 people. Trude elaborated on what she called a very dangerous situation. "Even the most cuddliest dog could turn into a killer," she said.

As a 12-year-old boy, TV animal show presenter Terry Nutkins went off to the remote highlands of Scotland to look after the otters that inspired the book Ring Of Bright Water and suffered, to quote ex-Castaway presenter Ben Fogle, "an unimaginable ordeal" (and he didn't mean having to sit through programmes like this).

Young Terry made the mistake of wearing a jumper previously worn by someone Edal the otter disliked. The animal attacked him and bit off two fingers. Like the other victims featured, Nutkins bears scars but no animosity towards the animal.

Ulrika Errikson-Walker lives with 59 animals. She doesn't have a guard dog, she has a guard duck (and here we began straying into Monty Python territory again). Out in the field she introduced Fogle to some of her animal friends. "These are all the big boys," she said, indicating a field of sheep and husband Roy.

He had a scary time with Rudolph the ram, who considers anything that moves fair game romantically. "He just jumped on my back. He was very amorous," recalled Roy with an inappropriate smile on his face.

Thankfully, the programme-makers spared us a reconstruction of the assault. I could cope with shots of severed fingers, bleeding arms and clawed legs. But the very thought of Roy and Rudolph in a compromising position was too mind-boggling..

Published: 03/07/2003