George Cansdale

George Soper Cansdale (29 November 1909 – 24 August 1993) was a British zoologist, forester, conservationist, author, and in the 1950s and 1960s a famous television personality in the UK. From 1947 to 1953 he was Superintendent of the Zoological Society of London.

Quotes

My training was basically as an ecologist—for forestry 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 Sahel could not be safely occupied other than by nomads, 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 modus vivendi.
- (1986) . "The problem of bore-holes". Oryx 20 (3): 182–183.

... by the third millennium b.c. the Babylonians had developed a mastiff type which is shown in art of that period. Egyptian monuments of at least one thousand years earlier show dogs very like the modern greyhound and others like the Aberdeen terrier.
- Animals and Man. London: Hutchinson & Company. 1952. p. 113. (200 pages)

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.
- p. 191

When Attenborough joined the BBC, 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.”
- James Parker, (April 2018) "The Beauty and Horror of Blue Planet II. David Attenborough’s latest documentary gorgeously reveals the world’s oceans—and shows how badly humans are screwing them up.". The Atlantic.