We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.

I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, 'Why don't you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?' And I always say, well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate.

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.

It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.

Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.

Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs?

I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.