Director´s view

You have to have a gun licence for a firearm, a driving licence to drive a car. If you want to buy a lion in the Czech Republic, you don’t need anything at all. A journalist, Zuzana Zelenková, confirmed this and then wrote an article on how she ordered a lion cub on the basis of an advert. “Just one phone call to Vysočina...

When Slovak rapper Rytmus recently added a picture to his Instagram account showing him with a slow loris while on an exotic holiday, he soon reaped a whirlwind of criticism. He inadvertently became the face of a Facebook campaign calling for a boycott of selfies with “cute animals”.

  When I was nine or ten, I got a paperback book with a white cover. It was written by John Crompton and was called The Life of a Spider. I read it repeatedly at primary school, but I even browsed through it at university, just before my exam under Professor Buchar. Not that I learnt from it, not at all, but thanks to the...

“Tři sta třicet tři stříbrných křepelek.” The Cameroonian schoolboys laughed as they successfully repeated the Czech tongue-twister after me. We were theirs. Later we handed out decks of cards and began to teach them a modified version of Old Maid. It consisted of pairs of cards depicting animal species that are...

As I write this column, the plane’s flight attendants are handing out heart-shaped sweets and greetings cards. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Ganbaatar handed me the keys to his Land Cruiser. The well is not far off, but it’ll better for us to go there by car in this freezing cold.

The dry road was replaced by ice and the car window slowly began to frost over. A clear sign that, even by Mongolian standards, it was cold outside. Something around minus thirty. Despite that, from behind the wheel Ganbaatar, our Mongolian associate and Director of the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area, repeated that this...

We had a lot of respect for the journey to the frozen Gobi in January. The reports coming from Mongolia spoke of temperatures falling to minus 50 degrees, and although not directly in the area where we were headed, we made sure we were equipped with the warmest winter clothing possible. It was worth it. Temperatures around 35...

She was born here as a Rothschild’s giraffe and before we could baptize her; she’d turned into a Northern Nubian giraffe.