Talking to Andrew Ucles Barehanded

Andrew Ucles (you-cools), the young hunter/conservationist who runs around in the wilderness wrestling wild beasts with his bare hands, tends to elicit a bemused, somewhat scornful reaction from the punters. “He's a lunatic!” they cry. Indeed, few people would think to smear themselves with intestine-juice and hide under a roo corpse in order to catch a swamp hawk, or scare a pride of big cats off their prey just to see if they'll attack. The sheer physicality of the 25-year-old's feats, which include running down feral dogs, pigs and wrasslin' crocodiles as well as plucking birds from the sky are somewhat confounding, especially when combined with his natural flamboyance and love of Michael Jackson (he practises moonwalking while staking out his prey). Maybe it is a form of madness, or at least impulse; but it is not without purpose.

For most of his life Ucles has been crashing his way through the undergrowth towards a pedestal in that lonely pantheon of mad, steel-balled outdoorsmen including Steve Irwin (one of Ucles's heroes), Bear Grylls (whom he begrudgingly respects) and maybe the Turtle Man (who I'd like to see him wrangle). There is always a raw end to this kind of entertainment, no matter how slick it gets, and Ucles is down for getting as dirty as the best of them.

Speaking to him in his parents' home in one of the low-rent suburbs that sprawl south of Wollongong, where Ucles completed an Environmental Science degree, I find a man not greatly removed from his on-camera persona. He is lithe, self-assured, and from an interviewer's point of view, hard to control, often prowling around the room to animate his tales.

The Truth of Africa

Ucles has recently returned from a 10 week trip to Kenya, where he accumulated some 50 hours of footage shot by a young local who'd never used a camera before. The trip was ostensibly self-funded; some of Wollongong's pubs and nightclubs threw fundraisers in his honour. Eventually though, he might get his money back. He has entered into a ‘talent holding agreement’ with Discovery International. The Africa tapes, he says, 'blew Discovery away.' No shit. Aside from rolling with poachers and almost getting speared for trespassing, Ucles racked up some heavy feats on camera, like outrunning a charging elephant, swimming with hippos and fucking with a whole bunch of lions.

VICE: What's the endgame when you do that? You get the animals to a point where they're captured and then you release them, but it's gotta be different with a lion or a hippo, right?
Andrew Ucles: Definitely, because it's the sort of animal that catches you, chooses whether or not to release you (laughs). OK… the way that I started looking at Africa when I was half way through was, this has all been one big lie… to bring tourism to Africa, a lot of it is based on how dangerous and ferocious the animals are… a lot of it is media talk. Don't get me wrong, you get these animals in a bad situation, and they are extremely dangerous. To honestly be attacked by a wild lion, you've really got to go out of your way. In a controlled environment, these are dangerous animals. I've always said, what is worse, a wild animal, or a tame one? I go, a tame one, because they're not scared of people. Generally wild animals have a fear of people. The only reason they want to attack you is out of threat, not out of food. That's about 90 percent of the time.

At the end of the day, when I had my confrontations with lions, and there's footage of me chasing a pride of lions, literally, it was the footage I wanted to get off the trip… there's great footage of me walking side by side with a lion… as I stopped, he stopped. I actually went down on the ground and started moaning as if I've been injured and start dragging myself on the ground. The animal was so intelligent, because he'd been watching me over the course of about a kilometre, he knew I wasn't injured, he knew I was trying to bring him in close, so he sat and watched me as I put on this little performance for about ten-fifteen minutes. He knew very well what I was trying to do. When I stood up he took off.

Did any of the Africans just think you were fucking crazy for doing that shit?
They all thought I was crazy. They called me The White Wizard. They saw me capture a range of animals that they don't touch, they just don't go near.

You've obviously got brass buttons. What does it take for you to actually reach a level of fear? For me, if I'm wading into a croc infested swamp, I'm already fairly scared. Where are you at, at a base level?
I guess that fear level starts coming into play when I don't have control anymore, and I think that's what fear is– the feeling that you've lost the essence of control. For instance, because I told you I had the edge on that elephant– yeah there was fear, but I knew I could outrun him over a distance. If he'd kept gaining on me, then obviously my fear level's going to increase. If I trip over and he's on top of me, then my fear's hittin' like a fuckin' peak!

Was that your most intense moment in Africa?
Well, I saw a man get attacked by a baboon. That was pretty hectic. I went to an animal sanctuary because I needed to acquire some experience of handling primates. In Australia the closest thing we've got to a primate is a black possum. One of the worst mistakes you can do is be a white man walking into somewhere in Kenya with a little bit of money and say to someone, 'I need experience, can you show me?' because they'll all say 'yeah, I've got experience, I can do it.' And that's exactly what happened when I walked into this animal sanctuary. This guy goes, 'oh yeah, I've held plenty of baboons and plenty of monkeys before, I can show you how it's done.' You pay me thirty bucks and I'll show you. They're always willing, I kid you not, they're always willing to put their life on The Edge for like twenty, thirty bucks. And they do! So anyway… he took me into this enclosure with these smaller monkeys and I go, 'I'm looking to handle a bigger monkey', you know, one which is a bit ferocious, cos we wanted to set up some footage of me wrangling with a baboon.

Which are renowned for being vicious, right?
Amazingly vicious. You know, you've got large baboons which come up to waist height, and then obviously you've got the smaller ones. So I thought, well, I'll probably just go an average sized one. So he sets up a cage trap and calls me early in the morning and says, 'I got one. And he's really, really mad.'

So I saw it in the cage, and it was going crazy. Trying to shake out, trying to grab you through the cage… we didn't have the camera on and I had everyone helping me around the cage. The guy says, ‘I’m gonna grab it by the tail and hand it to you.’ I go, ‘that doesn’t sound right…’ He says you kinda shake it around and stuff, and it loses its co-ordination. I go, ‘alright, no worries. I got the trust in you.’ I lift up the cage door and he grabs it by the tail… it’s screeching, going crazy… anyway, he manages to pull it out. I think for the first six seconds he had it under control. It happened so fast. The monkey jumped back onto the cage and then used that as a leverage point to jump back onto him. Boom, boom… it took a chunk. It took a chunk like that [indicates fist-sized morsel of forearm]. To the bone. It could have been a lot worse, cos that monkey was one pissed off monkey… If it woulda got him on the throat, which it was trying to, fuck, it would have annihilated him. I’m spewing, cos I never got the altercation on camera. It would have been perfect for Discovery. They love that sort of stuff.

So, do you find a line for yourself there? Do you go, ‘well, I’m not gonna fuck with a baboon?’
Yeah, 100 percent. At the end of the day… I don’t like monkeys anyway. If you catch them, there’s a very good chance they’re gonna catch you.

Is it true that you wrestled a hammerhead shark?
A small one, yes.

You can’t really train for that, right?
No, you can’t.

Meat Puppet

Ucles first attracted attention from the somewhat mainstream media in 2010 when he announced his plan to spend 100 days alone in western New South Wales bushland. Then 21, he accompanied this statement of intent with a video in which he implored would-be rescuers not to come to his aid. The purpose of the trip, he told me, was “definitely thrown out of context. The media never picked up on why I went out there. It was a message to the Government to show how much of a problem we have here in Australia with feral animals. Western NSW has one of the highest densities of feral animals–foxes, rabbits, feral goats, feral pigs, carp… the first thing you need to do is identify that you cansurvive for a hundred days out there… you need to identify a staple food source–I mean, a food you can always acquire.”

He left after facing unexpected, potentially mortal hardship during the first weeks of winter, feeling, after 67 days in the wilderness, that he’d at least proved the point to himself.

“The hilarious thing is,” he says, “the reason why the executives reached out was the Capturing Rabbits Using Snakes video that went viral. It's funny how the attention for me has come from this stupid thing.When I was doing it I didn't think anything of it. 'You've confronted the remotest part of the Zambezi River, you've went out and survived, neck-deep, 67 days in the Australian bush… and people are picking up on six minutes of you catching snakes? It's amazing.

“I'm looking at the formula… I've seen the niche for a very long time… all you've gotta do is give me the opportunity and I know exactly how I can craft my own thing. I know exactly.

“We've all seen a hundred people catch a snake, big deal, we've all seen a hundred people jump on a crocodile… what about if I do this: the crocodile is a very curious animal. Why don't I go catch a feral pig? I hitch him up to a tree where he can only move a little bit. I've strung him up and I've attached another little bit of rope to his front arm. I then go all the way down to the bank where I dig a hole, right? Cover myself in mud. You can't see me, you can't see me. And all I do is, I start playing, like a puppet, with that feral pig. The idea is I can get the crocodile to pass me, or over the top of me… that's where I see documentary going. It likens me to an animal in the moment…

“A lot of presenters, the way they get caught out is when they start losing respect for the animals. There's a line. There's a very fine line between getting amazing footage that shows the animal's behaviour and then going over that line. I think in wanting to get into this industry and wanting to lay the benchmark for that sort of stuff, you've gotta know where that line is at. Because there's a very fine line between you provoking the animal to see what instincts he's got, and then provoking him too much to where he goes, oh, 'tonight's the night I'm gonna kill you.'”

I ask about his plans beyond a successful TV show. Would he like to own a reserve, or maybe a zoo? He says he would like to be a shikari, if he had to pick. “My happiness honestly comes from chasing animals,” he tells me. “I know it sounds crazy or insane but that's where my happiness is. Not in driving a fuckin' Bentley or a Ferrari or having a mansion. I'll continue to do it. Even if nothing eventuates, I'll still be doing it.”

See more strange stories involving animals:

Animal Penises Are Super Weird, You Guys

Are Drones Really Helping to Save Rhinos and Elephants from Poachers?