London Letter: The burdens of being an exotic expert

Even though I have lived here for 14 years, no one considers me a local – even if I don’t open my mouth.

But sometimes it’s nice to be considered an exotic species.

I remember in one news conference at the papers where I work when a reporter was breathlessly speaking about someone she had interviewed who had been photographing Africa’s most prolific killer – a lion, no less.

I liked her and didn’t mean to prick her bubble, so I did it gently. Sure, lions are super-dangerous, but more people die from mosquito bites than lion attacks, I said. And if you want something less dangerous but more ‘newsworthy’ than a mozzie, it’s the hippo. That two-ton of blubber and yellow tusk kills more people than the rest of the Big Five put together.

But last week took the cake for ‘gee whiz’ stories.

A leopard had been sighted in London. According to the tweet-frenzy on Twitter, the big cat had escaped from the London Zoo, so the story was not as crazy as it seemed. (Zoo leopards live in cages simulating veld and its sort-of humane – except they spend their days salivating in the trees watching the thousands of dogs being walked in nearby parks).

The first thing I did when asked for my … ahem, expert advice as an Africa hand was to say that in daytime no one would see the leopard anyway. So any report was suspect. In fact, the only way you would know a leopard was in your garden was if your pet poodle went awol.

Then we got a report that it was a very small leopard, so my reply was that one size down was the cheetah – which was still quite big – and you wouldn’t catch it as it ran at 100km/h.

Fat cats

After that, you got a serval. But even though a serval has spots, it’s slender with a small head and doesn’t look like a small leopard. In fact, some of the super-sized Epol-gorging tabbies here could be more likely to frighten suburbia than a reclusive serval.

But what do I know?

This got me thinking – in the old days there were stories about Africa being so primitive that Brits thought there were lions roaming in the streets of Durban. Now that I am in England, there are reports of leopards prowling the streets of London. A serious case of role-reversal.

Eventually it was confirmed that London’s leopard was indeed a serval, a beautiful animal, but not in its wildest dreams does a serval think it’s a leopard. The poor creature had escaped from a private home, not a zoo, and was easily collared by local wildlife experts.

The newspaper described the terrified cat as ‘skulking’ – but what would you do if you were used to the bush and ended up in someone’s manicured garden with marigolds instead of marula trees?

I was explaining all this when I got an Instant Message to ask if I would like an eyewitness account of the dangerous ‘mini-leopard-like-creature’ on the prowl. No, I said – a serval is not a mini-leopard and will only claw you – albeit seriously – if you corner it.

The reporter seemed crestfallen. The story would have got us 100 000 hits online. Well yes, but also 100 000 scorns.

The problem is that as an ‘exotic’ expert, my shelf-life is short. Soon after the spotting of the spotted serval that looked like a spotted mini-leopard, I had to post a story about slave wages as a company which bought clothes from Asian sweatshops was moving into our area.

I told them it was relative. ‘Slave’ wages in London was decent money in the Third World. For 100 quid a month you could feed your family, hire-purchase a Tuk-Tuk and still have enough for some rice brewskis in Indonesia.

They believed me about the leopard – but not slave wages. So what if someone could afford food, beer and a Tuk-Tuk; real poverty is not wearing designer Nikes.

I know. It’s a cruel world.