George Cansdale

"My training was basically as an ecologist—for is largely applied ecology—and, since serving in Ghana for 14 years in the 1930s and 1940s. I have been back 14 times to East, South and West Africa. Even when I started work, it was already clear that the arid land such as the could not be safely occupied other than by s, who with their flocks and herds of grazers and browsers can use small patches of mixed vegetation scattered over a wide area, seldom causing anything more than limited short-term degradation, for the nomads had worked out a '."

"... by the third millennium the ns had developed a type which is shown in art of that period. Egyptian monuments of at least one thousand years earlier show dogs very like the modern and others like the ."

"Some animals lend themselves to use in idioms—the goose is a good example of this. As long ago as 1547 a simpleton was being referred to as a goose; presumably a domestic goose, for a wild goose is anything but a fool."

"When Attenborough joined the , in 1952, what were then called “animal programs” were presented by the superintendent of the London Zoo, a Mr. George Cansdale. Once a week, Mr. Cansdale would bring a selection of more or less compliant creatures to the BBC studio. He “put them on a table covered with a doormat,” Attenborough remembers in the preface to his new book, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, “where they sat blinking in the intense lights.”"