About the house.

Tigers.

When I started work as a tiger keeper, I never thought I’d be working from home! When one of our tigers at The Big Cat Sanctuary had two little tiger cubs, Spot and Stripe, it became apparent that they might need a little more hands on care than mum could provide.

Big Cats.

When we got a call that there was a five day old jaguar cub coming to the sanctuary, I had a bit of an idea what we might be in for following on from Spot and Stripe. After kitting out the house to accommodate an apex predator, we brought Maya home to make sure she made it to adulthood.

Bears.

I have a good friend, Matt Hunt, who also happens to be the CEO of Free The Bears Asia - a charity helping to conserve the asiatic bear species. They’re really good at what they do, to the point where they ran out of space for their residents! Matt asked me to move to Asia for a few months to help out with the building of a new sanctuary.

Ingenious animals.

Overview

Ingenious animals was a show hosted by Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall about how animals use their adaptations and behaviour to interact with the environment. Alongside Patrick Aryee and Lucy Cooke, I contributed to the show.

My episodes covered Kenya, Thailand and Australia. I worked with some of the worlds rarest and most incredibly adapted animals, including one of the only northern white rhinos on the planet, and the incredibly endangered clouded leopard. How do they communicate? What are their relationships like? And most importantly, what threats are they facing, and how can we help?

Other TV appearances.

International cheetah day

This clip really shows why I believe in a hands on approach to captive animals.

Unfortunately, we haven’t yet figured out a way to release captive born big cats into the wild successfully. Because of this, all the cats we have at the sanctuary will live out their days here.

I want them to be as comfortable and stress free as possible, so getting them used to human contact is vital so that we can carry out health checks and other general maintenance whilst keeping their stress levels relatively low.

This also allows the animals to be ambassadors for their species.

When tigers meet humans

Big cats have it tough in the wild.

As conflict can occur when they come into contact with humans, it makes it hard for the people who live alongside tigers to be advocates for them.

the illegal wildlife trade

I joined with Head of Carnivores at Paradise Wildlife Park, and Ian Jones & Chris Shepherd from Monitor Conservation Research Society to chat about the illegal wildlife trade.

It was great to get stuck into this really important topic.