The wolf cubs, all on their own, were crossing a little river bridge in the dark and empty heart of a small Alpine town. Neatly bunched, they trotted towards a camera set ready at ground level.
"No way!" I yelled at the telly, finally outraged by the trickery of The Snow Wolf: A Winter's Tale, the prime wildlife offering in the Christmas programmes of BBC Two.
The Snow Wolf was described by the broadcaster as a “dramatised natural history film” produced by a European film group. “Dramatised” was, indeed, a word echoed by narrator Emilia Fox, but her voice gave little hint of its import.
Fox’s narration unfolded the journey of an Italian she-wolf, supposedly forced to flee her pack, taking her young cubs on a mammoth trek across the mountains of Austria and Switzerland in search of a new mate.
We thought we knew about “dramatised” in natural history films. It’s when separate shots of wild creatures are edited together to compose stories of actual interactions and events.
The BBC’s esteemed Natural History Unit, based in Bristol, has thus “dramatised” the lives of meerkats, lions, penguins and many more without anyone feeling deceived. It may use speeded-up cameras to render actual action in slow motion, but not the “habituated animals and animatronics” that, by the group’s own admission, went into the fiction of The Snow Wolf.
An extraordinary early struggle between wolf and mountain bear did look somewhat awkwardly conducted (another critic noticed a fake paw swiping at the camera). But the excited commentary of the voiceover had me sufficiently persuaded of an exceptionally filmed event.
There were also some striking and natural sequences, as in the vivid chase of deer. It fitted the narrative about the richness of wildlife, not merely of wolves, encouraged by “rewilding” of the mountains. But the shot of a rare bearded vulture perched on a rock above the mother wolf was, again, implausible, its view across a close-up shoulder of the wolf a denial of any truly wild event.
It doesn’t help that, as I watch any wildlife film, a part of me lives behind the lens. Directing films for television was once among my skills, and wielding the camera myself a rare and exciting challenge.
For the early films, the cameraman was ornithologist David Cabot. We filmed the seals and wintering geese of the Inishkea islands off north Mayo and later followed the geese to their summer nesting ledges on the cliffs of Arctic east Greenland.
It was here, at our camp above a fjord, that the one and only wolf of my life appeared quite silently beside us, drawn by the smell of a curry supper.
We froze, spoons half to our mouths, as the animal assessed us, lean and silvery but oddly amiable, like somebody’s wandering dog. David groped slowly for the camera, but that was enough for the wolf’s alarm. We saw it later, in contest with a little herd of musk oxen tightly bunched with lowered horns.
Habituated wolves
Back on telly, soon after Christmas, Channel Four offered Sandi Toksvig and a celebrity friend taking face licks from friendly wolves at an upmarket lodge in northern Norway. Here, in a territory behind a high fence, a small wolf pack is encouraged to live moderately wild lives. In return, they attend well-trained guests who emerge from the glossy-windowed lodge to kneel in the snow and wait to be approached, with the chance to ruffle fur and be kissed by rough tongues.
Thus, captive and “habituated” wolves have been recruited in their own cause, as it were, to disarm the worst libels of their human reputation.
An award-winning Imax documentary, Wolves (1999), was once shaped with the same benevolence. Its close-up sequences, said its makers, showed the animals' complex and subtle behaviour and "the nurturing, co-operative way each wolf assumed its share of responsibility for the welfare of the pack . . . Few people know how communal and caring wolves are."
But shooting this intimate footage made logistical demands. In 2015 Chris Palmer and film-maker Shannon Lawrence confessed them online in a bold appraisal of the ethics of wildlife filming.
For the Imax film they had worked with captive wolves hired from a game farm, and staged the “den” in which to show a mother wolf suckling her pups.
“By industry standards,” wrote Palmer, “We’d done nothing unethical. In fact, we’d made the ethical choice. Renting captive wolves allows film-makers to avoid disturbing wild populations and potentially habituating them to human beings.Wild wolves would be deeply affected by prolonged and intrusive filming.”
Still, he felt “ashamed of the tricks I’d used in the past and I knew the future had to change”. But as The Snow Wolf shows, virtual reality still captures its audience.
