The next David Attenborough? Meet wildlife hero Cam Whitnall who rescued five lions from
One thing the human species unfortunately is exceptionally skilled at: the eradication of the animal kingdom.
Back in the 1950s there were 500,000 lions in Africa. Today they number 23,000 – i.e. a 95 per cent drop in the population in 70 years.
There are only 6,000 cheetahs in the wild, and 250 mountain gorillas. Salamanders have been around for millions of years, ‘yet they’re about to go extinct because of us’.
Cam Whitnall with lion
When it comes to chimpanzees, hunters kill the parents and seize the babies, ‘who are trafficked to places like Russia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, to be sold as pets for private homes and hotels’.
For every young chimp surviving this experience, ten adults have been slaughtered in the process.
Similarly, with orangutans. They are taken from the wild in Borneo, their parents killed, and then brought to captive settings in Cambodia to perform silly tricks for tourists.
It’s always harrowing to hear about rhinos killed for their horns, elephants for their tusks. Cam Whitnall once saw a baby elephant standing helplessly next to its dead mother.
Thirty-year-old Cam, star of CBBC’s One Zoo Three (‘a surprise hit’) and social media posts, says, ‘We’re fighting against so much destruction, knowing we’ll never be able to undo all the harm already inflicted on our planet.’
Animals seem to have little chance against habitat loss, African civil wars, polluted oceans, forest clearances, and rising population, which require the destruction of countryside for roads and housing – and all these things are, indeed, ‘driven by human greed’.
The number of penguins, for example, has plummeted by 97 per cent in 60 years, owing to oil spills, overfishing and climate change. There’s little ice left for them to stand on.
In the wild. Whitnall with an African rhino
Cam tells us about animals poached without mercy and captured for the illegal pet trade, ‘one of the largest criminal industries after drugs’. Creatures are often trapped in snares, ‘bleeding out in excruciating pain’.
Having painted a bleak, depressing picture – bears in cages having bile extracted; inbred white tigers suffering from immune deficiencies – Cam then turns the tables slightly to argue that people like himself, who are passionate about conservation efforts, breeding programmes and habitat protection, are now doing their utmost to ‘save species teetering on the brink of extinction’.
This is the exacting work going on in major zoos, where bloodlines are tracked across continents, everything overseen and co-ordinated by computers.
‘The end goal,’ we are informed, ‘should always be to try and put wildlife back into habitats that are protected and where they will be safe, even if that takes decades’. People have been having modest successes with gorillas and tigers. But will they really resurrect white rhinos in the lab from skin cells? This sounds very Jurassic Park.
C am grew up in a zoo, the Paradise Wildlife Park, Hertfordshire, where he loved mixing with the meercats and porcupines and observing the pumas, wolves and monkeys. Aged 11, he was on Blue Peter as Britain’s youngest zookeeper.
His family rebuilt the infrastructure, created new enclosures, rescued animals suffering neglect at the hands of circus owners, and improved the public facilities – even if balancing the finances was always a headache, and crazy golf, merry-go-rounds and a helter-skelter had to be brought in for the children. ‘The animals, the very reason the zoo existed, began to drift from the centre of decision-making.’
This changed abruptly when, in 2024, Cam threw himself into an adventure, covered by TV news cameras, to rescue five abandoned lions from war-torn Ukraine, pulling Yuna, Rori, Vanda, Amani and Lira ‘out of the bombing in Kyiv’.
The lions were there in the first place because they’d been acquired on the black market as exotic pets. There are idiots who fail to realise the ‘adorable little puffballs’ who are cubs will, within months, become incredibly dangerous. They are not big versions of golden retrievers.
As Cam warns, ‘One lapse in judgment, one moment of complacency, and everything changes,’ and owners lose a leg or end up in a body bag.
The Ukrainian lions were suffering from shell shock and concussion from missile attacks. Cam saw WhatsApp videos of bombs going off, drone attacks and air raids near the lions’ compound.
He at once formed a charity, Big Cats in Crisis, raising funds to mount a rescue campaign. A minimum of £750,000 needed to be found.
This is where Lion Heart hots up. It’s like an action movie, a race against the clock to design and construct the Lion Rescue Centre, near Ashford, Kent, opened officially by Baroness Hayman, animal welfare minister, and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian ambassador.
There are planning problems to overcome, difficulties with the builders, bulldozers, drainage, and fencing requirements. For months, the site is a muddy swamp. Next, the documentation required at border and customs control goes missing – all the painstakingly prepared paperwork to do with quarantine requirements, vet clearances, blood checks, government permissions, each page notarised in Polish, French and Dutch, plus Ukrainian.
Cam has to fly to the warzone in person with duplicates. He then accompanies the lorry with the cages and (sedated) precious cargo to the Calais-Dover ferry.
The whole drama was covered by a documentary team. Cam now makes his living travelling the world, uploading on to TikTok and Instagram his encounters with parrots, kangaroos, hornbills and bears. He gets millions of views. He is also a first-rate wildlife photographer, sponsored by Nikon.
The way he presents his programmes with enthusiasm and warmth, and how he describes the tension and emotion of animal welfare – Cam is a junior David Attenborough.