When Did Animal Planet Go National Enquirer?

Barbara Amiel finds that tabloid TV and shock culture have made their way onto the nature programs of Animal Planet.

Writing in Maclean's, Barbara Amiel finds that tabloid TV and shock culture have made their way onto the nature programs of Animal Planet.

When we were dog-less in Manhattan, I had to make do with the Animal Planet channel on the bathroom-mirror TV. Which is how I came to realize that human beings are doomed. A portentous narrator explained that mankind is outnumbered by hundreds of billions of birds, poised like marauding hawks to attack us (not to mention killer swans). Packs of feral hogs are spreading all over America. As for Florida, where I am a part-time resident, we face the Gambian pouched rat, which according to the program Killer Aliens is “the size of an average house cat. It carries deadly diseases that could potentially cripple the population of south Florida.” That’s not counting another 400 non-native species of wildlife, including killer snakes, that are colonizing the Everglades and strangling babies. “We are at the crossroads of interspecies chaos,” intoned a zoologist, whose name I can’t give you since the Kleenex I was using as notepaper while in the bath ran out of space after I scribbled the quote on it.

But what really did me in was the Monsters Inside Us program.

Heaven knows, we’ve all got enough on our minds without worrying about flies that lay eggs inside you via a quick trip into your nose or a scratch on your foot. How many times have you had a fly up the nose? Well, perhaps not so many, but I am a regular in that department due to the prevalence of flies in these subtropical climes and childhood remonstrations to breathe through your nose—unlike the nursery-rhyme old lady who didn’t and thereby swallowed a fly. When the wrong fly detours nasally, you get a revolting movement under your skin as egg turns into maggot burrowing into your flesh.

There were close-ups of the infected foot of a young girl—as pretty and nice as anyone with maggots under their skin can be, which isn’t exactly the Estée Lauder prom-perfect look. After that program came Confessions: Animal Hoarding, in which people like me who want to rescue the entire animal world turn into nutcases marooned among dozens of howling animals while friends cry quietly over the beloved one’s departure from sanity.

When did the Animal Channel turn into a sensationalistic animal National Enquirer?

Click here to read the rest.