INTERVIEW: Animal Planet will celebrate World Lion Day with feline marathon

Animal Planet will celebrate World Lion Day, an annual time to honor, cherish and educate oneself on lions and their uncertain future, with a variety of classic and new programming. Their marathon of feline documentaries will kick off 6 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 10 and continue for the rest of the day.

Dave Salmoni, TV host and big-predator expert, will be featured on a number of the specials and will welcome audiences throughout the day. Salmoni, a veteran of the network and frequent presence on Jimmy Kimmel Live, will help introduce such shows as Big Cat Diary, Into the Lion’s Den, Into the Pride, A Lion Called Christian and the all-new Clash of Africa’s Giants.

“You’re going to see the predation, if that’s your thing,” Salmoni said recently in a phone interview. “You’re going to see the cubs being cute with their mom and dad. You’re going to see the family bond, king of the jungle, all of the cliché things that make a lion a lion and make Lion Day one of my favorite days.”

World Lion Day is an important time to reflect on the species’ uncertain future. With continued threats from loss of habitat and poaching, these kings of the wild can seem downright minuscule compared to the power wielded by humans. The lion population has been reduced by 50 percent since the 1950s, and there are fewer than 21,000 left in the wild, according to Defenders of Wildlife. Although their range used to spread from Greece to northern India, today’s lions are mostly found in southern and eastern Africa.

“World Lion Day didn’t come about just because we all thought, hey, lions are awesome. We should give them a day,” Salmoni said. “There are a lot of animals that fit that and don’t have a national day and don’t get the national attention that lions get. … Lions are in big trouble, and with that trouble comes a responsibility to people like myself, companies like Animal Planet.”

Salmoni said that in southern Africa, where ecotourism is a major industry, communities have realized that lions have value, but in order to earn a safari tourist’s money, habitat and protection must be secured.

“They switched to the ecotourism model, and with that ecotourism model, those animals create jobs,” he said. “Then the populations in the south realize, hey, these guys are a value to us. We need to protect them, so that’s when all the anti-poaching units came up. That’s when the infrastructure of, hey, if you’re going to try to eradicate our species and ruin our land that these species live on, we are going to do everything we can to protect them.”

Salmoni’s love for lions began at an early age. He grew up as an athlete, playing every sport that he could. However, instead of having posters of his sports idols on the walls of his bedroom, he would display images of the iconic feline species. There were lions, tigers and probably bears (oh my!).

These “awesome” animals transfixed his young mind. “I would like to see one,” he told himself at the time. “I would like to touch one. I would like to smell one. … Absolutely I can remember as early as 3 or 4 years old loving lions, and I think it’s only gotten stronger.”

Turning his passion into a TV profession didn’t come right away. Instead, Salmoni was more interested in conservation efforts, but eventually be became convinced that Animal Planet and Discovery Channel were committed to his same ideals.

“I bought into that,” he said. “I would just kind of challenge the people at Animal Planet saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to go live with a pride of lions.’ … Intellectually just figure out a method in which you can be accepted by a wild pride of lions, and somehow that got approved. And then a couple years later, it was, ‘Hey, I’ve got a friend who has these 20 lions that are all way too aggressive for his land. He’s going to need to protect his staff and remove these animals, which to me was going to mean their death.’ So I went to Animal Planet.”

Often these TV projects, which extend beyond lions and encompass all big predators, began with Salmoni and his friends asking questions at the dinner table. Something like: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Then away he went.

He definitely was surprised when, a few years into his TV appearances, he could look at his day-to-day schedule and realize this is now his job, his childhood dream come true. “This is no longer just me trying to think of little funny things to do with animals and questions that I have in my mind that I need satisfied,” he said. “It’s now what I do for a living, and I would say that’s probably only been in the last five or six years as I’ve gotten a little older and done some strict hosting, which is wildlife related, and really got into the business side of it and the craft of being a host. I realized this is my job, at least for now.”

Some aspects of the job have changed from those first documentaries. “Recently I’ve gotten married and started my family, so that just changes my passion a little bit,” he said. “Absolutely I’m excited for the next big project, but I’m not the type of guy anymore that is just randomly on Friday pack a tent because I’m bored and disappear for three months whereas I used to do that all the time.”

Some of his adventures have been nail-bitingly intense and for some viewers and critics too close for comfort. Living with a pride of lions is not an activity every TV host would partake in.

He said that over the years he has had a responsibility to his work, his family and his friends. “With that is a certain level of blindness in that you kind of have to look your boss in the eye, shake their hand and say, ‘I promise I’m not going to become that story where victim host does idiotic thing and gets himself eaten,’” he said. “I’ve always had that responsibility to my work but also to my family and friends. So there have been things that I have said, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this,’ and all of the watchful minds have been, ‘No, you can’t. No, you can’t.’ That’s true of all my projects. I think almost every one of my projects, 90 percent of people who consider themselves educated on the subject would tell me I can’t do it. That was part of the allure I think to me at a young age. Then I went out and did it.”

However, sometimes his reassurances haven’t assured anyone, as he put it. “I can remember a time specifically recently I was on an island in the middle of nowhere, probably three or four days from any hospital, and there were killer whales hunting in a certain area,” he said. “Sometimes you have a director that says, ‘Absolutely, Dave, please stay safe. Get in there.’ This particular time I had a producer who was like, ‘Dave, no way.’ … It’s his responsibility. If I die, he’s the one that’s going to call my wife.”

No matter the adventure, Salmoni tries to focus on the larger picture of the species he’s documenting. That’s especially true with the lions he has encountered, and doubly true after the saga of Cecil the lion, whose death last year sparked an international outrage over trophy hunting.

“The first time I heard [they] hunt these animals just because they think they’re pretty and they want their heads as a trophy, it’s unfathomable to someone like me,” he said. “And it’s unfathomable to most of the world, which is why the Cecil story got so big.”

He added: “There’s a much bigger ecotourism world for people coming to take photographs than people trying to come and take heads. You can take photographs for 13 years of a big male lion if you leave him alone, or you can come and shoot him once. The public pressure upon African governments — saying I’m not coming to your country if you’re allowing this trophy hunting because I don’t want to fall in love with this animal, go home with all of my pictures and then find out he got shot because you sold him for $30,000 — that pressure is actually making a difference.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

World Lion Day programming will run all day Wednesday, Aug. 10 on Animal Planet. Click here for more information.