Naturally Humble

She’s made her name as one of the BBC’s best-loved wildlife presenters and has just fronted BBC2’s rural business show Back to the Land. With a book now out on our relationship with dogs, Kate Humble tells Jake Taylor that her love of nature began young in Hertfordshire, with the smell of tomatoes.

- Jake Taylor

IT’S not long into a conversation with Kate Humble that you realise the passion and enthusiasm that made her such a popular part of nature shows Spring watch and Animal Park isn’t just a TV persona. It materialises in almost every sentence, be it one about the benefits of walking – ‘I love it!’ or the merits of everyday British wildlife – ‘Nobody gets bored of a blue tit!’

It’s an eagerness that has made Humble a veteran of BBC science and nature programming and one of the country’s most treasured presenters. And right now, as she discusses her new book, Friend for Life: The Extraordinary Partnership Between Humans and Dogs, that infectious excitement is being served up in spades.

‘It’s a book that truly celebrates an extraordinary partnership, and an extraordinary relationship, that we humans have with an entirely different species,’ Humble explains. ‘It’s partly my personal journey of going on a real emotional rollercoaster of getting my first puppy, who happened to be a working dog, and trying to learn how to be the perfect partner to this animal.’

She says that through this journey she became more and more fascinated with how dogs have taken a role that no other animal has in human society.

‘I wanted to dig a bit deeper into that and I started looking into all the ways in which dogs have actually made themselves invaluable. Through that process I came to the realisation that as a species I don’t think we can live without dogs now.’

Humble certainly couldn’t live without her own pup – a Welsh sheepdog called Teg – but it may come as a surprise that a woman who has worked with a vast range of wildlife was daunted by the responsibility of raising an animal.