Captured

Mirror snapper who spent decades exposing cruelty & saving animals

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

Mirror photographer Roger Allen, who exposed some of the worst examples of animal cruelty around the world, has released a book focusing on the creatures that captured his heart.

Fleet Street legend Roger, an award-winning snapper for 25 years, was instrumental in rescuing a menagerie of assorted animals including a bear that had been abandoned by its keepers in war-torn Bosnia and an orphaned orangutan kept chained up for 14 years.

In How to Rescue a Tiger and Other Animals, Roger reveals that it was Mely the orangutan that transformed him into an animal rights campaigner.

After a gruelling river journey to a remote part of Borneo, Roger discovered Mely chained to a wooden post, sitting alone on a verandah, kept as a neglected family pet.

"I crouched down, just two feet away from her, as she sat in her own filth," he writes. "What happened next will stay with me forever.

"She looked at me as if asking for help, then slowly put her arm out with her palm extended.

I did the same, and our hands touched.

"Her palm was hard and rough. She didn't squeeze my hand but held it gently, all the while looking me straight in the eye." Speechless, Roger could only wonder how Mely, who had spent her entire life chained up and mistreated, "still had the capacity to express need and tenderness".

"Having seen her mother killed, she'd been kept as an amusement until she'd got too big and unruly, and then had been chained up," he writes, noting that Mely was the same age as his youngest daughter.