Soap operas will not wash for wildlife

Natural history documentaries are a globally significant source of public information about conservation (Dingwall & Aldridge, 2006). The BBC's Natural History Unit has a particularly stellar international reputation for natural history filmmaking, but has been criticised for ignoring the plights of many of the species they feature (e.g. Monbiot, 2018), for giving the impression that wild places are solely for nature, and for neglecting the presence of people in many habitats (Sandbrook & Adams, 2013). After the Second World War, wildlife films took on a more scientific character, diverging from the prewar sensationalist and cinematic style of people like Martin and Osa Johnson, but despite this shift in tone, wildlife documentaries still have a major aim of being popular rather than strictly factual (Brockington, 2009). There is also increasing attention being paid to the importance of assessing the impact of such documentaries and the form of their narratives (e.g. Jones et al., 2019). Here, we argue that a conspicuous Received: 10 November 2020 | Accepted: 26 February 2021 DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10202


| INTRODUC TI ON
Natural history documentaries are a globally significant source of public information about conservation (Dingwall & Aldridge, 2006).
The BBC's Natural History Unit has a particularly stellar international reputation for natural history film-making, but has been criticised for ignoring the plights of many of the species they feature (e.g. Monbiot, 2018), for giving the impression that wild places are solely for nature, and for neglecting the presence of people in many habitats (Sandbrook & Adams, 2013). After the Second World War, wildlife films took on a more scientific character, diverging from the pre-war sensationalist and cinematic style of people like Martin and Osa Johnson, but despite this shift in tone, wildlife documentaries still have a major aim of being popular rather than strictly factual (Brockington, 2009).
There is also increasing attention being paid to the importance of assessing the impact of such documentaries and the form of their narratives (e.g. Jones et al., 2019). Here, we argue that a conspicuous pre-occupation with the 'personalisation' of individual animals and the heavy use of a largely constructed or exaggerated 'jeopardy' misinform viewers and may ultimately create problems for conservation by giving the public a distorted view of wildlife and therefore a weak base on which to form opinions about how conservation should be pursued.
While anthropomorphism may in some circumstances enable people to relate more easily to wildlife and conservation issues, filmmakers and scientists who may contribute to documentaries do need to ensure that excessive anthropomorphism that may mislead or distort reality is avoided. The possible problems with these narrative approaches, underpinned by anthropomorphism, are exemplified by the popular BBC wildlife documentary series Dynasties. First broadcast in 2018, Dynasties was presented an exceptionally anthropomorphic depiction of natural history and therefore provides an ideal case study to examine the problems of this approach.
Before going further with the analysis of the messages conveyed by this series, it is worth placing it in the context of the origins and evolution of wildlife documentaries. Their development, conventions and techniques were the subject of Mitman's detailed study Reel Nature (Mitman, 1999) and Bousé's Wildlife Film (Bousé, 2000), along with Brockington's Celebrity and the Environment. Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation (Brockington, 2009), which looks particularly at the role of celebrity. Celebrity is very relevant here because of the influence of Sir David Attenborough, the presenter of Dynasties, in informing and influencing people's views on wildlife and the environment (Revell, 2020).
The advent of the natural history or wildlife film came in the early 20th century with the filming of lion or other hunts in East Africa. It is hard to identify the first such film, but certainly one of the earliest was made by a cameraman, Cherry Kearton, who accompanied the hunting expedition led by Theodore Roosevelt (the former American President) in 1909-10. The film of the expedition was released by Motion Pictures Patent Company in on 18 April 1910. It was a failure with the public, with no live hunting scenes and no live film of lions. Mitman says the message that came over from the failure seemed to be that 'audiences craved drama over authenticity' (Mitman, 1999). Further films in the 1920s were more successful, with the appeal of these early attempts to film animals in the wild leading to the development of a wildlife film industry based largely on dangerous or charismatic megafauna in the wild both to entertain and, sometimes, to educate; not that different from aspects of the Dynasties series which is the focus here. Similarly, as films were produced to meet audience interest, conventions of editing together sequences filmed at different times, using forms of artifice (including filming captive animals as though they were wild) and constructing stories from disparate films sequences developed.
Even though filming technology, sound recording techniques and the ability to get cameras into positions to film wild animals in close up have advanced hugely since the early films, at times fakery or artifice in terms of cutting together unrelated sequences to make a narrative is still heavily used. In Dynasties (see below) there are clear examples of shots cut together to create sequences that may not have happened in real life. An example of an older Attenborough-fronted documentary using fakery that was unacknowledged in the film but later revealed was the filming of polar bears in a zoo amid fake snow which purported to show a polar bear giving birth in the wild in the BBC's Frozen Planet in December 2011 (Independent, 2011). Horak has warned that few documentaries are now "strictly documents of animal activity, but are artificial constructs… Narrators state flatly that filmmakers have waited patiently in the jungle for years in order to 'capture' an animal on film. Directors, however, spend much more time in the studio and in the editing room than on location… [which] helps to create an artificial 'emotional' relationship to animals…nature filmmakers produce at very high shooting ratios, then construct specific events through editing, utilizing images which may indeed have no spatial and temporal relationship to each other and may involve dozens of animals, rather than the one example ostensibly being depicted" (Horak, 2006). Bousé (2000) also argues that methods used in shooting and editing together disparate pieces of film to create supposedly continuous action sequences, with close-ups and an accompanying script, are intended to prompt a sense of intimacy and create more of an emotional bond between viewer and animal.
Anthropomorphism may be an important part of this in stressing individuality and personality through artifice and narration. This is an analysis that is very relevant to the final versions of the Dynasties episodes reviewed here.
We should clarify that we are not arguing that anthropomorphism is in itself a bad thing. The rejection of all human-like traits in animals, or 'anthropodenial' as Frans de Waal has dubbed it (Waal, 2017), is clearly misguided. It is where the tendency to portray animals as humans is taken to extremes that it may have a distorting effect on public understanding of human-wildlife relations (especially when the real humans in the landscapes are ignored), and therefore undermine the understanding of the aims of conservation.

| DYNA S TIE S
The BBC wildlife documentary series Dynasties concentrated on 'five of the world's most celebrated, yet endangered animals'. It was narrated by Attenborough and aimed to tell the 'true stories' of the featured species: penguins; chimpanzees; lions; African wild dogs; and tigers. Each was shown 'in a heroic struggle against rivals and against the forces of nature' as 'these families fight for their own survival and for the future of their dynasties' (BBC, no date).
The title injected a note of anthropomorphism intended to pull in audiences. Producer and director Rosie Thomas explained that chimpanzee groups are "very political, and at times it's a bit like watching a soap opera…Similar to politics, there are characters that you like, and ones you don't like" (Archer, 2018). From the start, the programs assigned soap opera dynamics, political and human emotional characteristics to animals, built up through shot selection and scripting.
It was an approach that worked; Dynasties gained a wide audience and attracted very positive reviews. Ed Cumming in the Independent, summed it up well: "It focuses on families, which is another way of saying that Attenborough & co are no longer even pretending not to be launching a direct assault on the heartstrings. The animal footage in these programmes has always been a distraction, but it's a sumptuously shot high definition red herring…Human emotions are the reason we come back" (Cumming, 2018).
The problem that can arise from this approach is that, by labelling the documentaries as 'true' or 'authentic' when there is a high level of artifice or reconstruction of supposed events created the danger that the informative and educative role of wildlife documentaries is distorted, with misleading information being conveyed. The BBC mission statement is to 'inform, educate and entertain' and, clearly, wildlife documentaries are a balance of all three objectives. But the question we ask here regarding Dynasties, and the wider approach of treating wildlife documentaries like soap operas or dramas, is whether the mission to inform and educate is becoming subsumed in order to deliver sufficient entertainment. This leads to a more important question: is this approach good or bad for conservation?

| E X AMINING THE DY N A S TIE S EPISODE S
The first of the series was broadcast on 11 November 2018, de- Most of the episode is set during the dry season, a yearly occurrence that is nevertheless presented as a unique existential threat.
David is depicted as particularly threatened by this part of the annual weather cycle: "As the dry season begins, David's potential competitors are gathering…David is alone, he's never been more vulnerable" (BBC, 2018a). The building of jeopardy continues through the narrative, developing the impression that the younger males consciously and constantly plan insurrection against the dominant male.
A new threat to the well-being of the troop is later presented when some of the adult females, until then hardly mentioned, come into season. This is a regular occurrence and does engender conflict among males. A fight between David and a group of young males is shown, at the end of which the screen fades to black, implying death. The film then shows an injured David, with a strong implication that he is fatally wounded, although he appears only to have lost a digit. Some females gather round him and 'tend his wounds', but then move off. There is a series of shots with the focus pulling out from the injured chimp with the script saying that 'David is left for dead'. However, he later rejoins the troop and retains dominance.
As this would have been known before the script was written, the he is about to die narrative with accompanying melodramatic music are clearly there to elicit emotions and to suggest imminent death rather than reflect the chronology of what actually happened.
The wet season is treated in the scripting as a miracle which saves the chimps rather than an annual event. The film and script Despite well-researched and long-standing estimates of hunting ability and success levels (e.g. Funston et al., 1998Funston et al., , 2001, the failure of many of the pride's hunts is presented as an unusual and looming threat to pride survival rather than something that is routine to all prides. Other existential drama includes one of the young males confronted by a large pack of hyenas. The narration says he is in severe danger of being killed, and yet when another subadult male turns up they drive off the hyenas with ease. In focusing on single individuals, accuracy is sacrificed for sensation. The lioness Charm is presented as a single mother fighting for her cubs when there are clearly at least three other hunting-capable lions in the pride who can help make and defend kills. Much of the episode is premised on the concept that there is intense and murderous rivalry between neighbouring packs, in this case each pack being led by related (mother and daughter) dogs. But, as Hunter (2011) has explained, wild dogs have large territories and while those of packs overlap, active territorial defence is infrequent, and when it does happen is around den sites and is not about occupation of an entire territory.
In the Dynasties treatment of wild dog pack interaction, one pack harasses and pursues another pack. This harassment forces the weaker pack to leave their territory and venture into the 'pridelands', where they are in danger of elimination by lions. Lions certainly do kill wild dogs, but across Africa the two species live in the same areas and lion ranges are not no-go areas for wild dogs. The narrative also stresses the danger from 'forests full of hyenas' (BBC, 2018c). That wild dogs are usually successful in driving off hyenas is ignored. The emphasis on hyenas as the enemy and the use of the term 'pridelands' clearly alludes to The Lion King with no regard for factual accuracy regarding the extensive coexistence of these species.
The fifth episode in the series, about tigers (BBC, 2018d), was less artificially pre-occupied with individuals and their interactions, as tigers (except females with dependent cubs) are usually solitary.
But the narrative continued to be anthropomorphic and jeopardy driven. At one stage, it is suggested that an Asian sloth bear is likely to attack the cubs yet at no point is the bear shown near the cubs (BBC, 2018d). The tigress depicted is described as having to strike an impossible balance between hunting and protecting her cubs but this is something all solitary mothers in the wild do and is hardly a sudden or extreme danger. In another scene, one of the cubs meets a male tiger at a waterhole. The narration says he will not harm the cub as it is his daughter. How do they know, and how for that matter, does the tiger know? Oddly, the narrative then goes on to undermine this myth by admitting that male tigers rarely see their progeny (BBC, 2018d). Later on, the main tigress is injured, and we were then told that 'A serious injury to a mother tiger can mean starvation for her cubs'. But it is clear the cubs are old enough to go their separate ways, so the jeopardy element is again false.
Dynasties focuses heavily on named individuals, and presents stories framed as a soap operas. Jeopardy is emphasised throughout, with human emotions, sociopolitical conflicts and relationships used to provide context. Animals are also endowed with the capacity to be aware of, and work towards, the dynasties of the title. As Dingwall and Aldridge (2006) conclude from their scrutiny of a range of TV wildlife programs, the commercial and narrative imperatives of the 'blue-chip' productions influence how science is represented.
Does this matter for conservation? Some conservationists have argued that promoting anthropomorphism could even be helpful. Tam et al. (2013), for example, showed that anthropomorphic presentation of environmental issues was associated with higher 'connectedness to nature' scores in experimental conditions. They suggest such narratives could be a useful low-cost strategy in environmental promotion, and that educators might consider anthropomorphic narratives in 'school curricula and public service announcements'.
They were however cautious concerning the use of 'fictional animal personas'.
The dangers inherent in this strategy, which we believe to be particularly relevant for the extreme version deployed in Dynasties, have been outlined by Root-Bernstein et al. (2013), who allude to it as powerful but 'double-edged' sword. And as McCarney (2018) points out there is little evidence that anthropomorphism can be harnessed to promote public commitment to habitat protection, rather than an emotional reaction to particular animals-something seen vividly in the public reaction to media reports of the killing of a lion that had been named Cecil, in Zimbabwe in 2015 (Somerville, 2017). We are not arguing that wildlife films should not be seeking to evoke an emotional reaction to nature, or its conservation. Nor are we arguing that films that do so are necessarily unscientific. As Kay Milton has argued, denigration of emotion as in conflict with scientific rationality expresses a false dichotomy (cited by Brockington, 2006). On the contrary, emotion is a ubiquitous reaction to nature, and an inspiration for conservation. But emotion can be evoked, and ethically so for conservation, without depending on exaggerated depictions of animals as 'persons'.
As Brockington (2009) argues, many conservation/wildlife filmmakers believe that they have contributed to conservation, but films can make animals into a spectacle with lots of sound and fury, an argument also made by Mitman (1999). This suggests that while documentary films about wildlife may be popular, and give their audiences exciting experiences and an idea that they know more about wildlife after watching a film than before, they do not in reality necessarily make any great contribution to developing public understanding if they depend on spectacle alone. The ability of wildlife films to inform the public to an extent where they can make informed decisions on conservation issues (such as trophy hunting, wildlife trade bans or other legislation that may affect global conservation (Bega, 2020;Dickman et al., 2019)) is, in practice, limited. While the evidence linking nature films and human behaviour is complex and uncertain, there is good reason, however, to expect that nature films can increase support for conservation (Jones et al., 2019). In laboratory conditions, subjects exposed to audiovisual presentations with greater emphasis on the anthropogenic threats to biodiversity showed greater willingness to donate to environmental campaigns (Shreedhar & Mourato, 2018). Recent research on social media reactions to documentaries presented by Attenborough suggest a strong influence on public opinion, as Fernández-Bellon & Kane (2020) have set out. They analysed social media behaviour suggesting public engagement with environmental issues after the broadcast of Planet Earth 2 by the BBC and found that "effects on audience awareness of species persisted beyond the broadcast of Planet Earth 2…natural history films coupled with opinion leaders (e.g. David Attenborough), using broader reaching channels (e.g. online streaming platforms), or that engage with the public (e.g. social media campaigns) have strong potential to promote pro-conservation behaviors" (Fernández-Bellon & Kane, 2020). Where such films are less than accurate in their portrayals, the behaviours promoted could therefore be misinformed and inappropriate.
A focus on individuals, and particularly individuals of charismatic species, rather than populations is increasingly recognised as inimical to conservation. Tom McShane, a former director of the World Wildlife Fund's Central Africa program, has speculated that such 'animalism' and its obsession with individuals is a trend which draws attention from more pressing issues in conservation (Martin, 2012). Indeed, the unprecedented media reaction to the 2015 killing of Cecil the lion (Macdonald et al., 2016;Somerville, 2017) demonstrated that much of the public does conflate the fate of individual animals with conservation. The coverage of the event gave a false impression that trophy hunting was a prominent conservation issue for lion persistence, and almost completely neglected the real threats for lion conservation: habitat loss and persecution.
A second conspicuous issue occurs for conservation where anthropomorphism promotes negative stereotypes. Bousé points out [p165] that this anthropomorphism brings with it the projection of human (predominantly Western) values onto animals: individuals are praised for their 'courage', 'patience' or parenting skills. This leads to perceived moral deviance in species where these virtues cannot easily be identified. Individuals of a species can be imbued with 'evil' human qualities (Root-Bernstein et al., 2013). Among the most obvious is the wolf in North America, which has long acquired a stereotype as murderous and bloodthirsty. The treatment of the spotted hyena in Dynasties (BBC, 2018b) lazily reinforced its long-standing negative imagery in fiction (which like that of the wolf is deeply embedded in the cultures of people encountering them). Conservation efforts for these species are clearly not going to be helped by filmmakers who use these ancient tropes to fortify their wildlife soap operas. Indeed, the conservation of all species who are not like humans in the 'right ways' (including all plants) is unlikely to be helped by this tendency (Root-Bernstein et al., 2013).
Clearly, Dynasties was an entertaining and popular series. It garnered favourable reviews and excellent viewing figures, and undoubtedly made the public more aware of the species covered.
While public awareness is important for conservation, we argue that the extreme anthropomorphism, focus on individuals and false jeopardy that characterise Dynasties (and similar output, including the popular series Meerkat Manor and Big Cat Diary) could have negative consequences for real-world conservation. Such an approach risks distracting people from the realities of the natural world and the requirements and complexities of conservation, as it shifts focus away conserving habitats and populations and towards safeguarding individual animals. Bradshaw et al. (2007) made a similar case, arguing that the 'dumbing down' which accompanies sensationalism tends to distance audiences from the realities of the natural world. It would be refreshing to see the same production values and stunning footage being used to portray more scientifically accurate narratives and to introduce people to the realities of modern-day conservation.

CO N FLI C T O F I NTE R E S T
A.G.H. has received payment from the BBC for TV and Radio work, but none connected to this article. The other authors declare no conflict of interest.

AUTH O R S ' CO NTR I B UTI O N S
K.S. conceived the original idea and undertook initial analysis; A.G.H., A.D. and P.J.J. contributed to writing and editing.

DATA AVA I L A B I L I T Y S TAT E M E N T
No data were used for this work.