All Of The Koalas In This Show Are Over 18

Me and GGF went for a long walk today, along the canal from Islington to Victoria Park, Hackney. We walked for the best part of four hours, and got a bus back. Before that we had walked down to Indian Veg in Chapel Market for the best £3 curry in London. My feet are sore but my soul is happy.

I am watching BBC Four, a wildlife program about Australia, which has just told me that eucalyptus trees are so indigestible that the koala has to sniff each leaf it eats to assess its chemical make-up and see whether it is too poisonous; and even then, the koala chews 16,000 times a day which will eventually wear its teeth out and has a long, specialised gut to get anything out of the enterprise; and that extracting the toxins takes up so much energy that it has to sleep 20 hours a day; and that the baby koala eats it’s mother’s shit, and that doing this populates the baby koala gut with the bacteria it needs to live on eucalyptus leaves. Cue shot of baby koala emerging from pouch to eat shit emerging from mother’s arse.

The property TV programs we get a lot of these days has been described as “property porn” because of the way the houses are fetishised. And thus do wildlife channels make wildlife porn.

Wildlife porn corrupts our view of the creatures around us. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy it. But, like sex porn, it is essentially exploitative.

The soundtrack builds around a scenic wow moment as the narrator’s Shakespeare voice tells us all is good with the beautiful complex world we live in.

But this is, just like sex porn, a load of old bollocks.