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Returning: Dateline

Dateline meets UK zookeepers fighting to protect animals locked up during lockdown.

Dateline returns to SBS next Tuesday.

Episode Eighteen “Zoo Trouble” looks at challenges in the UK.

As Britain began to emerge from COVID-19 lockdown, Reporter Evan Williams travelled to Devon England to meet Australian-born Benjamin Mee, owner of Dartmoor Zoo, an attraction made famous by the film We Bought A Zoo, starring Matt Damon. Dartmoor is a zoo in trouble. Britain’s businesses are reopening, but the government has ordered all zoos remain closed, indefinitely. With no income, Dartmoor and other zoos face permanent shutdown. If they do close, the majority of their animals will have to be euthanised.

With lives in the balance, Dateline examines an industry in peril while unveiling a conservation crisis that threatens to decimate not just zoo animals, but all of Britain’s native wildlife.

The investigation takes Evan to the offices of Born Free, a charity for re-homing exotic animals; on a rescue with the Wildlife Aid Foundation, a volunteer group saving native animals in distress; and to the grounds of a 12th century castle, where two farmers may hold the key to saving the zoo industry, and sustaining British farming and conservation in the future. 

Tuesday, 1 September at 9.30pm on SBS.

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