Forrest Galante is the wildlife biologist and conservationist the world needs right now. He’s engaging, he builds his conservation work on a solid foundation of science, and he truly loves all animals in a way that echoes Steve Irwin — gleefully swimming with sharks and gators. Galante is also an adventurer who spent his pre-COVID time globe-trotting around the world working in animal conservation while also trying to locate extinct species on his Animal Planet show Extinct or Alive.
To celebrate this year’s Shark Week, Galante teamed up with elasmobranchologist Dr. Dave Ebert to concentrate on 3 sharks off the coast of Southern Africa, all considered extinct. The result, Extinct or Alive: Land of the Lost Sharks, is a captivating television and an escape that feels great for this moment in history. You with Galante to distant lands while getting the right data on an organization of fish that have suffered a lot at the hands of humans.
This week, we talked to Galante on the phone about his new show. After talking about shark hunting, we enter the ever-changing world of animal conservation, hunting and poaching in volatile times. We laughed so much that we had a few shots of whiskey with this man, to see last week’s UPROXX LIFE expression consultation below.
So, before we get into the programs, let’s communicate a little bit about how you’re an advocate of nature.
I grew up in Zimbabwe, which is a very wild place. But look, many other people grew up in Zimbabwe and didn’t become environmentalists. In Zim, I was the son of farmers and safari business owners. So I spent my whole life in the bush and developed to become an adult, who loves animals.
As I like to describe it, Zach, you don’t forget when you were a kid and you flipped something like a log and you saw a worm, do you? And you’re like, “Oh my God, is it rarely that cool?” Well, the most people come out of this. I didn’t. Growing up, I sought to know everything about this worm. I looked for what he ate, where he lived, what made him vibrate, what he ate, etc. So as I got older, I turned my love for wildlife, animals and science and became an educator and got a Bachelor in my hobby to become an environmental advocate. I started as a biologist and learned that my talents were much more in clinical communication than at the academy. Then I started communicating science on other platforms and ended up on television and I’ve been here ever since.
His new show, Land of the Lost Shark, then takes place in South Africa and Mozambique, where he favors lost sharks. How do you work on finding animals that are believed to be extinct?
I’ve made myself a position in my world as a guy who digs up those animals, animals that others can’t find. So at Lost Shark Country, I had the incredible privilege of teaming up with Dr. Dave Ebert, a world-renowned elasmobranologist (also known as shark scientist) who named more than 40 species of sharks himself. He’s known as the boy from ‘Lost Shark’. Dave and I are friends. That’s great, man.
So I contacted Dave and said, “Hi, Dave, there are some spaces in the world that are hot spots for lost sharks. One of them is my old court, South Africa. Why don’t we pass out and paint in combination? to see if we can scrape some of those things. And Dave said, “Forrest, I wouldn’t like anything.” So we took this to netpaintings and said, “Hey, I know last year we discovered a lost shark in Sri Lanka, in Pondicherry, yet this year Dave and I, combining our experience, him at a very educational point and mine at a more physical point, we believe we can locate even more lost species in the coastal waters of South Africa and Mozambique. What are you thinking? “And they say, “We love it. Good luck.”
So what distinguishes your shark document?
The other thing is that ours is much more of a clinical documentary. I think the headliner with certainty, and it’s not, I’m not looking to criticize Shark Week, but I think the headline of Shark Week is a Tyson opposite Shark. Things like ‘Swimming with sharks’, you know?
Ours are rigorous clinical paintings in the search for these animals. We, an hour-old episode, are about 14 other species of elasmobranchs, which is an incredible amount of animal diversity to have in a 44-minute TV episode.
That sounds fantastic. Or we’re travelers. Or we’ve been adventure travelers to the fullest of our lives. And for the first time in our adult life, we live in a time when you can’t just get on a plane and leave. There is a truth in what has a fairly serious influence on conservation activities: you see an increase in poaching, etc.
How does it adapt to not being able to travel, examine and work?
What’s appealing is that I think other people have polarized criticism about what’s going on. And the truth is, there are two sides of the coin. What I mean by that is that in some options we are seeing big positive changes. I guess at this point, everybody’s noticed those stories of coyotes coming back to the cities and bears coming out of their hiding places. There’s a Malabar civet that was seen walking down the street in India. In some cases, with the shutdown and locking, the animals recoil a little and recover in one direction. Even if it is very short-term, where they are able to leave their hiding place and re-occupy niches that have otherwise been occupied by humans since we remember.
It’s for wildlife. It’s like giving him a breath of new air. It is as if the strain has been released for very, very short time.
But again…
In the other aspect of the coin, the ugly fact has also appeared. With these government closures, we have noticed an increase in poaching efforts in some localities because if the government closes its doors, the other people who oppose poaching and surveillance also close and poachers lick their lips and say, “This is my chance.” For example, in countries in southern Africa and parts of Asia, we have noticed an increase in poaching activity among rhinos, elephants and big cats.
Then there’s the pangolin, well, it doesn’t make sense to me because pangolin is the species that’s been classified lately as guilty of the global pandemic. However, this species experienced a large increase in pandemic poaching because all other people and law enforcement agencies that sometimes review to stop have been closed.
I mean, talk about a terrible turn of events. You’d think, if a pangolin gets labeled as responsible for a pandemic, maybe we’d stop consuming and killing them? But instead, the opposite has happened. It’s increased the demand, which is crazy.
I don’t need to be dark, but with the global pandemic came here, new remedies, and I’ll use this term quite obviously.
Can you give us an example of what you’d consider a bullshit animal remedy?
Bear bile is one of them. We have noticed a significant increase in bear malatur abuse and bear poaching for their bile. We’ve noticed that this is accumulating just because some eastern medicine says bear bile can cure coronavirus. So now all those bears are being slaughtered and they’re experiencing a terrible abuse for this.
So, there are both sides of the coin. Something’s good. Some of them are sad. I think the pandemic has given other people who paint the possibility of seeing other people’s true colors. Those who poached saw an opportunity to hunt more. Then there are those who have noticed the ray of hope, namely the animals seeking to recover.
I grew up sensing the link between hunting/fishing and conservation in the United States because it will be worth it. And I sense how in some parts of Africa the labeled game will also pay for conservation. But I feel like it’s not enough anymore. This formula was already in very volatile terrain, first, especially in southern Africa. So, now that this pandemic has helped reveal this, we have to ask ourselves, “Well, what do we do now?”
One of the most unfortunate things, Zach, is that there is no panacea. Each species wants its own management, its own policies and everything wants its own strategy. There’s no magic button.
I’ll take that back. There’s a magic button, is it rarely there? There is a magic button and it is to prevent without delay any habitat destruction and hunting practices. But there’s a big difference between being positive and being realistic. And this “magic button” is not realistic. It is certainly up to everyone to avoid the invasion of wildlife habitat and the capture of wildlife. So, without that being a possibility, and it’s not, what makes wildlife science so complicated is that each and every animal, whether an insect or a rhino, wants its own control plan.
And those plans want to be developed through scientists, like me and others who are much more competent than I am, to put those plans into effect. They want to be studied and everything I have just indexed requires time, cash and resources that the global does not have at the moment. So that’s a really hard question to answer. I mean, there’s no quick fix. Now, having said that, there are other wonderful people and organizations fighting all negativity. Second, what other people can do are those groups, organizations, and causes.
What are you running on next and how complicated is it to do your job?
We’re still painting. Wildlife paintings never sleep. Although we face more demanding situations than ever before with restrictions, my team and I are doing what we can to continue fighting the right fight. We have more projects coming to this country. I can say that right now I have more educational pictures than pictures of television because that’s exactly the nature of the pandemic. Things are quiet and relatively unresolved, but at the same time we are using it.
We do our best to generate awareness and percentage of the message. I have projects on the way in some places and news resources around the world. Some of them report on COVID wildlife abuse and things like that. And yes, keep plugging in. I think it will be a little more domestic for the foreseeable future than most of my paintings have been in the past, but so be it. Charity starts at home, as does wildlife.
You can watch Forrest Galante in “Extinct or Alive: Land of the Lost Sharks” on the Discovery Channel on Tuesday, August 11 at 8 pm EST. You can also paint Galante on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.