EPISODE 07: Big Cat Diary Uncut – '2005: Honey and Toto'

Welcome to The Big Cat People podcast! We're Jonathan and Angela Scott, award-winning wildlife photographers, authors and conservationists. We have made our name documenting the lives of lions, leopards and cheetahs in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.

Today's episode is called '2005: Honey and Toto', and it is the seventh episode in our ten part series named Big Cat Diary Uncut. Join us in this episode as we go back in time to the year 2005. One of the things that defined Big Cat was that our Producers and Executives at the BBC Natural History Unit were always looking for innovations, whether discussing programme style and structure with their counterparts in the Entertainment division at the BBC and Animal Planet, or looking for other ways to bring great production values to the series. We benefit from collaborating with the Planet Earth team during their visit to the Maasai Mara to film some helicopter aerials to give a heightened sense of scale to the landscape and our place in it, just a tiny vehicle marooned in the enormity of the savanna.

However, this series would not linger on in the audience's memories for years to come due to the stunning visuals. It would forever be remembered for a tiny cheetah cub that Jonathan names Toto - meaning “child" or “little one” in Swahili. The three-month-old male cub is the only survivor of Honey’s third litter. Jonathan sets the reality of the scene for viewers when he says, “I will be amazed if Toto survives.” The series ends on a sorrowful note. After the crew had returned to the UK, Simon and his wife Marguerite stayed on to film cheetahs for Planet Earth and discovered Honey alone a few days later. I recorded a last line of commentary while back at the Natural History Unit in Bristol, and remember being conflicted by the need to not simply speak my truth rather than, it seemed to me, struggle to avoid acknowledging the inevitable. Toto had died, and while we could not be certain what the circumstances had been, most likely it would have been lions or hyenas that killed him.

This podcast series is a continuing effort to educate and inspire our audience. If you'd like to learn more about us, or to check out our latest collection of educational ebooks, please visit our website: www.bigcatpeople.com.