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On safari with Damian Aspinall - in Kent
Damian Aspinall treats the dangerous animals in his wildlife parks like kin. Here he opens up about his controversial - yet unparalleled - success in breeding endangered species in captivity
'I have a lovely relationship with a black rhino,’ Damian Aspinall says. ‘Her name’s Salome. But for the last two or three weeks she hasn’t been interested. If I go and see her, I can tell if she’s agitated, if she’s not in the mood. She might be pregnant, she might be in love with one of the other rhinos – there’s definitely something going on.’ Unlike humans, in whom deviousness and deceit run deep, animals, Aspinall says, ‘don’t lie to you’.
‘I certainly don’t think we’re superior,’ he continues. ‘At best we’re equals. But I think the way we react to nature makes us inferior. Our total lack of respect for all of nature, in my mind, makes us uncivilised and inferior.’
It is a sunny day at Howletts, the 95-acre wildlife park near Canterbury in Kent, and Aspinall is steering his golf cart along the footpath, giving me a guided tour. In the back is a basket of nuts. We have paused to feed the lion-tailed macaques, the moloch gibbons and the Javan langurs, and admired in passing the European bison and red river hogs. The black rhino, and a gorilla named Ebeki, are still to come.
Damian with a baby gorilla (The Aspinall Foundation)
Aspinall, a wiry, fit-looking man of 55 with untidy swept-back hair and a brisk manner that can border on impatience, is often portrayed, in his own words, as ‘a mad, lunatic playboy’, but that, he says, ‘is very unfair’. He is certainly unusual. Not many people would claim to have a ‘lovely relationship’ with a black rhino, or wrestle with a 300lb gorilla, as Aspinall will do later on our tour. But there is a method in his madness.
Over the past 40 years Howletts – founded by his father, John, in 1957 as a private fancy – and its sister park at Port Lympne have become among the world’s leading zoological establishments, not only in the breeding of rare and endangered species, but in the practice of reintroducing animals into the wild. ‘First people to reintroduce black rhinos in Africa...’ Aspinall ticks off the list. ‘First people to reintroduce gorillas into the wild; first and only people to reintroduce moloch gibbons into the wild; leading breeder of Javan langurs, reintroduced to Indonesia. European bison, reintroduced to the wild in Romania. This is all pioneering stuff.’
The beginning of the Aspinall's extended family
Earlier we had been sitting in the drawing room of the fine neo-Palladian house from which the wild park takes its name. A housekeeper brought tea and mint biscuits; antiquarian books lined the shelves; photographs of Aspinall and various members of his family – human and animal – hung on the walls. A large bronze bust of his father stood ceremoniously on a plinth.
John Aspinall was a gambler and casino-owner, who famously numbered Jimmy Goldsmith and Lord Lucan among his closest friends. But he was a man who appeared to love animals more than humans. It was a love affair that began in 1956 when he purchased a forlorn-looking capuchin monkey from a pet shop in Regent’s Park, which he named Dheddi – as in ‘dead loss’. Aspinall and his then wife, Jane Hastings, installed the monkey in their flat in Eaton Place, where it was shortly joined by a nine-week-old tigress and two Himalayan bears.
Following complaints from neighbours, Aspinall started looking around for a more suitable property to accommodate his animals. A successful bet on the Cesarewitch enabled him to purchase Howletts in 1957. Aspinall gradually accumulated an impressive collection of animals: Indian elephants rescued from a life of servitude, tigers, lynxes, tapirs, gorillas, and more capuchin monkeys as playmates for ‘dead loss’ – who lived until 1991.
In 1984 he founded the Aspinall Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the protection and preservation of rare and endangered species, and which Damian Aspinall has run since the death of his father in 2000.
John Aspinall was a pioneer in breeding wild animals in captivity – work that his son has continued with remarkable success, by following the practice of giving animals a diet and living conditions as close to their natural state as possible. Howletts maintains its own greenhouses, herb gardens and acres of forestland to feed its gorillas, leaf-eating monkeys, elephants and other animals.
John Aspinall goes swimming with a hand-raised tiger (The Aspinall Foundation)
Until 1956 no gorilla had ever been born in captivity. The first to be born at Howletts was in 1975. Since then 136 gorillas have been bred at Howletts and Port Lympne, along with 35 eastern black rhinos – one in three of all black rhinos bred in captivity in Europe; 139 clouded leopards, 42 Javan gibbons; 178 Javan langurs, as well as dusky leaf monkeys, African elephants and endangered Malayan tapirs. ‘All born here,’ Aspinall barks. ‘In Kent!’
'Caught in the contradiction of owning zoos while abhorring them'
Aspinall dislikes the word ‘zoo’, with its Victorian antecedents in animals being displayed as objects of curiosity and amusement, its implicit assumption of man’s mastery over beast. In Aspinall’s parks animals take priority over people, and his policy, he says, is resolutely ‘anti-commercial’. There are no train rides or play parks. Animals are not ‘locked out’ of their sleeping quarters for the benefit of visitors, as is sometimes the case at other establishments, and are given ample areas to hide from public view. He sometimes receives complaints from visitors to Howletts that they have not seen some of the animals at all.
Rather than having what he calls ‘postage stamp’ collections of two or three of each species, animals are kept, as far as possible, in family groupings. There are no sea lions or penguins, which would be popular but have no conservation value.
Indeed, it seems that Aspinall would rather not open to the public at all, but he allows it is vital in paying the bills. ‘The reality is,’ he says, ‘if zoos didn’t exist nobody nowadays would open a new one. There is no way in the world you could go out and collect animals from the wild. It wouldn’t be acceptable. You would invest the money in protecting animals in the wild. But it’s very difficult, because zoos are trapped. They have these huge overheads; they have all these animals and a public that’s addicted to seeing them.’
The first gorillas from Aspinall’s parks to be released into the wild, in Gabon in 1999 (The Aspinall Foundation)
So he is caught in the contradiction of owning zoos while abhorring them. ‘I openly admit that. One is trapped. You need visitors to help pay for it, but you’re also acculturating the next generation to the idea that zoos are acceptable, which they’re not. Really, Howletts and Port Lympne shouldn’t exist in 30 years. We should be protecting the wild well enough that it makes places like this redundant. But I’m the only person I can find on the planet who thinks that.’
John Aspinall: a man of extreme opinions
Aspinall’s father was a self-confessed quasi-fascist and eugenicist, whose great hero was the 19th- century Zulu chieftain Shaka. He believed that equality was ‘unbiological’ and nursed a pronounced animus for clever, independent-minded women, particularly those of left-wing views. The population of Britain, he once suggested, could usefully be reduced from 58 million to 18 million by ‘beneficial genocide’, and he would gladly surrender his own life ‘if I could guarantee to take two billion others with me’.
A man of extreme opinions, then. ‘Yes,’ his son nods. ‘But that’s not a bad thing. I would rather have an extreme opinion than no opinion, which is what most people have. He was his own worst enemy in many ways. He was brilliant, but he courted controversy.’
Damian was the first of Aspinall’s three children, or as John Aspinall’s biographer, Brian Masters – a writer slavishly in thrall to his subject’s peculiar view of the world – would put it, ‘the senior juvenile who had to earn his place in the primate hierarchy’. Damian’s father and his mother, Jane, divorced acrimoniously when he was nine. His father was granted custody, and Damian never saw his mother again. She died in 2011.
John Aspinall married and divorced once more before finally marrying Lady Sarah Courage, the widow of the racing driver Piers Courage – ‘the perfect example of a primate female,’ as Masters put it, ‘ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable’.
His father, Aspinall says, was ‘old-fashioned’. ‘Children should be seen and not heard, not brought to the dining room until you’re 16 years old – that sort of thing. One always knew he loved you but, typical of that generation, they don’t really show it. I never had an inheritance. I never had a trust. My father never bought me a car, never bought me a flat. I was his son – get out there; do it on your own. But undoubtedly it’s made me what I am today.’
John with Shamba, one of the first gorillas he acquired, and her baby (The Aspinall Foundation)
He left boarding school, and home, at the age of 16, and spent two years working his way round the world. On his return he went into property, quickly making his first million, which he has supplemented several times over by following in his father’s footsteps, opening Aspers, a group of four casinos dispersed around England.
Aspinall has two daughters, Tansy, 25, who runs a jewellery business, and Clary, 22, from his marriage to Louise Sebag-Montefiore, which ended in 2002; and a third daughter, Freya, 11, by the television presenter Donna Air. His relationship with Air ended in 2007. While encouraging his daughters ‘to stand on their own feet in life and in business,’ he says, he will not be adopting the same approach in the longer term that his father did.
His father's foundation: a poisoned chalice
Inheriting the Foundation on his father’s death was, he says, ‘a poisoned chalice’. Howletts and Port Lympne were losing millions of pounds each year. ‘Dad ran these parks like a private enterprise. That always infuriated me because it was burning money; there were no stocktakes, no structure, nothing.’
The Foundation is now funded by donations from around the world from, among others, Zac Goldsmith and Trudie Styler, and raises millions of pounds from its Ormeley Dinners, which are held every couple of years. His children take an active interest in the Foundation, and Aspinall says he hopes they will carry on the work after his death.
Damian’s grandmother goes shopping with Shamba in the 1950s (The Aspinall Foundation)
Establishing the parks on a more secure financial footing enabled Aspinall to concentrate on what he describes as his ‘big mission’: reintroducing (or to put it more accurately, introducing for the first time) animals to the wild. John Aspinall established the Foundation’s first overseas project, a gorilla sanctuary in Congo-Brazzaville, in 1987.
That project was the seed for two major conservancy programmes that are now run by the Foundation, one in Congo-Brazzaville and one in Gabon, where, following lobbying from the Aspinall Foundation and other organisations, the half-a-million-acre Batéké Plateau National Park was created in 2002. The following year a group of seven gorillas from Port Lympne were introduced there, and the first infant to reintroduced gorillas anywhere in the world was born.
Aspinall’s programme of reintroduction has been questioned in zoological and conservation circles, with some arguing that animals born in captivity – domesticated so to speak – would be unable to survive in the wild. ‘OK, so do you believe you can domesticate a gibbon in one generation?’ Aspinall’s voice rises in indignation. ‘You can’t take a gibbon that has lived for 100,000 years in the rainforest of Indonesia, and then they have eight years in Kent and suddenly they can’t live in the wild? It’s nonsense.
‘Firstly, you can’t domesticate an animal in one or two generations; and secondly, who are we to underestimate their intelligence? We have no right as a species to take these animals and enslave them for our entertainment. None at all. Surely we owe them a chance?’
His policy of reintroduction is carefully monitored, he explains. ‘We don’t just dump animals out there.’ They are ‘rehabilitated’, watched, tagged and protected.
The dangers of working with animals in captivity
Last year the programme suffered its worst set-back when five gorillas that had been introduced to Batéké a year earlier were found mutilated and dead. The five were ‘wives’ of a male, Djala, who had been rescued and come to Howletts in 1986. The gorillas appeared to have been attacked by another male, Aspinall says. ‘No one quite knows what happened. But if you look at the total number of gorillas we’ve released, the survival rate is something like 85 per cent.’
Djala and family at Port Lympne Reserve (The Aspinall Foundation)
John Aspinall loved nothing more than frolicking with his tigers, gorillas and elephants, but his incautious approach to safety made Howletts notorious for a series of tragic accidents in its early years. In 1970 Robin Birley, the 12-year-old son of Aspinall’s friends Mark and Annabel (who later married Jimmy Goldsmith), was mauled by a tiger, leaving him permanently disfigured. (Birley, evidently not a man to hold a grudge, is now on the board of trustees of the Aspinall Foundation.)
Between 1980 and 2000 five keepers were killed by animals, two by the same tiger within a matter of days of each other in 1980. The story is a terrible one. ‘The first death, the keeper shut the tiger off, and then went in to clean the cage, but the tiger jumped the fence and killed him. They thought he had gone into the cage when the tiger was there, and couldn’t work out why. Before he died he’d scrawled the letter “F” and nobody knew what it was. A week later the other keeper went in and exactly the same thing happened. And it seems the first keeper was trying to write the word “fence”.
Aspinall shakes his head. ‘Awful. But at the time we weren’t doing anything wrong.’ The fence, he says, was at a height universally accepted as ‘safe’. That height was subsequently increased. Safety, he stresses, is now of paramount concern at Howletts and Port Lympne.
Aspinall says that his earliest memories of growing up at Howletts are of ‘gorillas and tigers and wolves all running around the house’. But he believes his own affinity with animals is ‘genetic – 100 per cent. My father was an amazing man like that: he had a deep connection with animals, and I’ve inherited that off him. I can’t really explain it – there’s just a communication between you and the animal, whether it’s a rhino, a tiger or a gorilla. People say you can’t talk to them, but you can. You just don’t talk in a human-centric way. When I’m with the gorillas I’m fully communicating with them, and they with me.’
Uncle Damian and his animal family
He fetches a collection of pictures. ‘Here’s one of me with a 350lb tiger on my back.’ It looks as if he is actually wearing it. ‘There’s a 300lb gorilla on me.’ And there he is at the age of 10 making friends with a tiger. Aspinall sighs. ‘You couldn’t do that today with social services…’
Like his father Aspinall was at pains to introduce his own children to animals at an early age. He reaches for a picture showing Clary at three weeks old, being cradled by a gorilla. The gorilla looks positively ecstatic. ‘Can you see, she is going, literally, oh my God, this is so cute.’ He points to another picture. ‘And here she got so excited she’s biting her own arm. And when Clary started crying she started rocking her.’
Damian’s baby daughter Clary meets a female gorilla (The Aspinall Foundation)
His father once said that he would rather entrust his grandchildren to gorillas than a social worker. ‘Well it depends on the social worker – and the gorilla,’ Aspinall responds.
Looking at the photo of him disporting himself with the 300lb gorilla, it occurs to me, I say, that the gorilla might not be quite as welcoming to me.
‘But you’re not a member of the family. In almost all relationships you see with animals, it’s the master-slave relationship. Any animal in that circumstance will resent that. But I believe you can have a relationship with these animals as loving and as meaningful as you can with your human friends. They don’t see me as the boss. I’m a member of their family. They’ll bring their kids up to play with me – “It’s Uncle Damian!”’
On our tour of the park, Aspinall has stopped to chat to a keeper. He has good news. Salome the black rhino has been observed mating with a male, Zambesi. ‘Excellent!’ Aspinall says. Salome is 11 years old but has never had a calf, he explains. Perhaps she will now. We make our way to a large enclosure where two black rhinos are grazing. One raises its head inquisitively and, apparently recognising Aspinall, ambles over.
‘Hello, darling!’ he cries. This is Salome. He lets himself in through the gate. There is a second barricade, waist-high, of reinforced steel, with openings narrow enough for a man – but not a rhino – to pass through. Aspinall slips through, and Salome rubs herself up against him. The need for the openings becomes clear; if Salome turned quickly she could inadvertently crush him against the barricade.
Aspinall reaches for a stone and starts pummelling her back; then, awkwardly, Salome falls on her side, inviting him to rub her tummy. This display of mutual affection has alerted Zambesi, who stands a few feet away, pawing at the ground. Salome makes a snorting sound. ‘She’s telling him to keep away,’ Aspinall says. Zambesi gets the message, turns and walks away.
Damian with a young gorilla (The Aspinall Foundation)
We climb back into the golf cart. We are off to see a gorilla. Ebeki, who was born at Howletts, is 12 years old. He and Aspinall are, in his term, ‘family’. The enclosure that he shares with a female, Emmy, is huge, with an arrangement of wooden structures for climbing, a pool and swings; a thick blanket of straw covers the ground. Ebeki has bounded over to greet Aspinall and sits on the other side of the mesh fencing, regarding ‘Uncle Damian’ with an expression perhaps best described as eager anticipation. He is big. Very big.
‘He could snap my ribs like Twiglets,’ Aspinall says, ‘that’s how strong he is. I have a cartilage that’s been parted from my ribs and a smashed joint in my neck. But all of that is just from play. There’s no animosity at all.’
He jumps over a guard rail and vanishes along a narrow pathway, reappearing through a gate at the back of the cage. The two creatures, man and beast, fall to the ground in an embrace. For the next 10 minutes they wrestle like children. At length, Aspinall has clearly had enough. He walks, swaying slightly, to the door, but Ebeki bounds after him, wrestling him back to the ground.
Aspinall calls to the keeper, who in an attempt to lure Ebeki away brings fruit to the fence. Ebeki goes to collect the fruit, but as Aspinall tries to get away, the gorilla bounds across and wrestles him back to the ground. The keeper brings more fruit. Wise to the ruse, Ebeki grabs Aspinall’s hand and drags him to the fence, so he can eat the fruit without losing his playmate. It is another 10 minutes before Aspinall can finally make good his escape.
He joins me on the other side of the fencing. He looks completely exhausted – as exhausted as you or I might feel if we had spent 20 minutes wrestling with a very large gorilla. Straw is sticking to his jacket and his hair. He smells of… gorilla. We climb in the golf cart and drive away. Ebeki is sitting in the cage, watching, a wistful expression on his face.
‘He loves me,’ Aspinall says. ‘And I love him.’
A Life with Animals: A Photographic Celebration of the Aspinall Foundation and Family, published to mark the 30th anniversary of the Aspinall Foundation, is now available