As a boy, his best friends were bears and wolves, and later on his own children shared their nursery with a baby gorilla, who they treated as a big brother. Damian Aspinall, son of the legendary gambler and maverick zoo keeper, John Aspinall, grew up surrounded by his father’s exotic pets and has passed on his all-consuming passion for wildlife to his children.
Amid sculptures of pouncing lions and leopards at home in Knightsbridge, he says: “It’s magic crossing the species boundaries, and the greatest thing about being alive. You can’t explain to people who don’t have it.”
The Aspinalls are well known for their special relationships with animals, adopting wild orphans and raising them alongside their children. “Some animal people have a deep-rooted connection, and it comes from very deep in here,” he says, pounding on his heart.
“When you look at your cats or dogs and they look into your eyes, there’s an understanding and a level of love like they’re your children. You see their pain, you see their love and you instinctively understand their wants and needs. Imagine having that with primates and lions!”
The millionaire casino-owning environmentalist, once a staple of the international party circuit with supermodel girlfriends such as Naomi Campbell and Elle Macpherson, has devoted his life and fortune to conservation. He runs Howletts and Port Lympne wildlife parks in Kent as well as the Aspinall Foundation.
“Animals should have as much right to happiness as we do and to coexist on this planet, which is far more important than we are,” he says. As we speak, Aspinall is preparing to repatriate a whole family of gorillas to their homeland this summer. “I’m very wary. It’s like sending your children out into the world, knowing the dangers they’ll face. Taking a group of adult gorillas and uprooting them from the place they’ve lived all their lives could go terribly wrong.”
Damian, 54, was brought up at Howletts, a 700-acre estate in Kent, where his father’s oversized, pampered pets prowled the house and gardens and were given the freshest fruit and vegetables, Sunday roasts and even chocolates. This Noah’s ark idyll, however, was disturbed by occasional maulings and, over the years, five keepers died after being savaged by tigers or crushed by elephants.
But Aspinall says he had “an extraordinarily blessed childhood. We’ve got Super 8 films from the 60s of me as a seven-year-old, playing with tigers and bison around a tree or tearing around the lawns with a gang of wolves; and all of us being chased and diving in the pond to try to get away from the wasps after we upset their nest.”
He loved living at close quarters with his family’s wild menagerie and almost all his friends were animals. But whether he admits it or not, he clearly craved human contact. “No one came round to see me,” he says wistfully. “You don’t get playdates when you’ve got tigers in the garden. The odd mate came, otherwise it was just me and the animals. To be perfectly honest, I’ve always felt disconnected, and humans inevitably let you down – animals never do. There’s more of an honesty and purity there.”
His earliest memories are not of his mother or father, who was largely absent, but of a female gorilla that became his surrogate mother. He likes to tell an old story about getting stuck up a tree and, when his father ignored his crying: “She came up, put me on her back and climbed back down, wiped away my tears and spent the day comforting me.” He was virtually raised by apes and, as a baby, was placed in the arms of a female gorilla, a family ritual he later repeated with his own children, recently stirring controversy after he released a video of his daughter Tansy as a toddler being carried around by an adult gorilla like a doll. “Some people thought it was lovely and sweet and others who are ignorant about animals said: ‘Oh it’s mad, the gorillas are trying to kill her’ – all that nonsense. The biggest problem with society today is that it’s so sanitised.”
His father set up Howletts in 1957 as a private zoo where animals were housed humanely on immense parcels of land. “Everyone thought he was crazy having predators wandering everywhere,” says Damian.
In 1966, when he was six, his parents had a bitter divorce on the grounds of his mother’s adultery. His father – a mercurial, misanthropic figure with whom he had a difficult relationship all his life – got custody and sent him to boarding school. Damian never saw his mother, Jane Gordon Hastings, a Scottish model, again. She died in 2001. Did he miss her? “I’m happy to talk about anything, just not that,” he snaps, shifting uncomfortably. “I don’t know … I think anyone who’s brought up without a mother is going to be affected.”
Aspinall is convinced that he inherited his fearlessness, cavalier disregard for convention and great love of animals from his father. Since taking over the wildlife parks and foundation in 2000, he has far exceeded John’s ambitions. “You have to understand that when he died, there was no money in the bank and these parks were losing £4m a year. Now we have to find £10m a year. I can see why the other family members didn’t want to be involved. My brother and sister had no interest in animals, but I was compelled to do it.”
Like his father, who made his fortune from his Mayfair casinos and used it to create country estates for his wild animals, Aspinall uses the profits of his property and gambling empire to keep his charity afloat, as well as funding the patrolling of the foundation’s conservancies in Kenya, which span about 1m acres.
He has to employ 24-hour armed guards to protect the animals and his staff and the forests from poachers, along with vets, whisperers and naturalists to nurture and teach the gorillas, rhinos and monkeys how to live wild as they make the transition to freedom. So far, his charity has returned record numbers of gorillas, elephants and primates to Africa and Asia. “When my father first came up with the idea, he was laughed at. But we’ve been doing it successfully for years and even though we’ve introduced 60 gorillas back to the wild, no one else has introduced any.
“These animals have a right to go home. All this rubbish about ‘They’ve lost their wild instincts’ said by some scientists – what do they know? Who are we to play God and say they can’t go back? Zoos are barbaric places. It’s like locking children up – it’s deeply unethical.”
Unlike his father, who claimed his animals were more important than his children, Aspinall is a hands-on parent and adores his daughters. His eldest, Tansy, 25, and Clary, 22, from his first marriage, are both keen to continue the conservation work begun by their grandfather. Tansy has been promoting the foundation’s work and organizing fundraising galas, while Clary is volunteering in a Cambodian orphanage. Damian’s 11-year-old, Freya, whose mother is the television presenter Donna Air, is animal-mad too.
You sense that when he talks about his family or anything else, he is always thinking about his beloved silverbacks. “I’m happiest with the animals,” he admits. He lives between his home in London and the Kent compound, where he devotes weekends to his furry extended family and frequently joins them in their enclosures for midnight feasts.
“I make a huge pot of vegetable stew and go to see them. I find peace among them. When I’m with them, the world stops and nothing else matters. You just don’t get that with humans. It probably sounds corny, but it’s just pure love, unadulterated honey, and you soak it up.”
And with that, he goes off, smiling.
From http://www.theguardian.com
The Key of Immediate Enlightenment 