David Attenborough on The Hunt: More truthful than anything that has been done before

SINGAPORE — You recognise the scene all too well: The predator is well camouflaged such that its prey apparently doesn’t notice. A pause as it gets ready. It lunges forward, jaws agape ... but misses its target by mere inches. The prey bounds off to live another day.

While many nature documentaries often revel in the kill; The Hunt, a new documentary series that premieres tonight on BBC Earth Asia, eschews those bits.

Executive producer Alastair Fothergill said: “There have been quite a lot of shows made about predators and they’re always shown as red in tooth and claw and the villains of the piece, but that’s actually very inaccurate. They usually fail. So what we wanted to do was to make a series that turned predators into the heroes of the natural world.”

The series, which took about three years to make, was filmed all over the world — from the polar ice caps and vast oceans to the grasslands of Africa and the garden city of Singapore. It looks in great detail at the strategies predators use to catch their prey. “But the prey also have a lot of strategies to avoid the predators. So we’re looking at both sides of the deal,” said Fothergill.

The Hunt is narrated by one of the most recognisable voices in nature documentaries, David Attenborough, who said that, thanks to advancements in technology and cinematography, “a new summit to natural history filming has been reached with this series”.

“We managed to film three completely new behaviours: One of them was of a very hungry polar bear climbing a cliff to look for food hundreds of feet up,” said Fothergill. “That polar bear was really risking its life. That has never been filmed before.”

But The Hunt is more than just a look at animals’ lives in the world around us. “This series tries to show the world as it is,” said Attenborough. “The question about how we should treat the natural world is a question of opinion. President Obama recognised how valuable and important it is for the people of the world to collaborate and protect our greatest and most valuable possession.”

Is the call to protect the Earth all a little too late? “I think this realisation may be very late ... but in fact I don’t think it’s too late. We can always get things done — and there’s much to be done — and the fact that nations are getting together to do it is great encouragement.”

Attenborough hopes that the series can give viewers a more “vivid and exciting understanding of the natural world”.

“The Hunt is more truthful than anything that has been done so far. There are so many human beings in the world that the natural world is under huge pressure. It is of paramount importance to curb this (sort of destructive behaviour).” Christopher Toh

The Hunt starts tonight, 8.05pm on BBC Earth Asia (StarHub Ch 407).