ARCADIA, Calif. — Biologist Forrest Galante was 14 when he and his family were evicted from their home at gun point. His family had lived in Zimbabwe for six generations and ran a safari business and small farm when he was a kid.
But that was all to end abruptly. “With the (Robert) Mugabe regime and the political uprising, guns in the mouth, guns in the back of the head, kicked off our land kind of thing. Then we fled the country to the United States,” says Galante.
“My father was estranged, so it was just my mother, my sister and I,” he says. “We left a 16,000 square-foot home and 200 acres, and a very successful business. The currency was blacklisted, so we had three suitcases of clothes and $400 to our name. So we went from this very different African lifestyle to the three of us crammed into a one-bedroom government housing project in Oakland, California. Big upheaval,” he sighs.
While that might have defeated some, it simply stiffened the family’s resolve. “Mom scrimped and saved,” he says.
“We came as political refugees and that was short-lived. And my mom, who used to run a 200-person farm and a multiple-thousand (dollar) safari business became a waitress. Quite a jump.
“We slowly climbed our way back up. And my sister and I both went to school on scholarships and moved to Cayucos, Calif., a small town about four hours north of here, a surfer town,” he says.
Galante had been fascinated by animals ever since he was a boy. “My entire time, I wasn’t in school, I was in the bush,” he says. “I remember the first time putting on shoes. I was pretty close to feral. At one time, I had 14 vivariums in my bedroom filled with venomous reptiles. I loved my animals and wildlife as a kid, was running around catching, fishing, chasing everything I could.”
He still is. Only now he’s searching for animals that are supposed to be extinct. His quests are featured on Animal Planet’s series “Extinct or Alive,” where Galante and his intrepid team prowl the most obscure and remote areas of the world seeking elusive creatures.
His untamed childhood may have prepared him for the dangers of his mission, but Galante is hard put to choose the worst. “I’ve been in two plane crashes, walked away from both miraculously, been stung by a man-of-war jellyfish, bitten by two different sharks, bitten by a venomous adder, mauled by a lion, chased by a hippo, bitten by a crocodile — it’s hard to pick one,” he shrugs.
“I broke my back in Thailand, was paralyzed from the neck down, thought forever. But my feeling came back.”
He says he incurred the injury by jumping off a waterfall “like an idiot.” He was drowning because he was paralyzed and was saved by his zoologist wife, Jessica, who dove in the river and pulled him to safety.
“A lot of people think I’m crazy,” says the 31-year-old. “But to me the juice is worth the squeeze — not just on an individual species level — just being able to show that habitat on television to millions of people, for them to be inspired to care about it and want to conserve it,” he says.
“And the most rewarding part of my job is the hundreds of messages I get per day from people saying, ‘I want to grow up and be a conservationist, I want to preserve and protect habitats.’ That makes the shark bite worth it, and the 400 bee stings that I got in Borneo worth it, and the leech bite that is literally probably still bleeding through my sock because they never seem to go away, worth it.”
Whether it was in the jungles of Madagascar or the barren lava flow of the Galapagos Islands, Galante has been relentless in his quest and says he’s never frightened of the wild. “Wildlife isn’t scary,” he says. “They don’t want to have anything to do with you. It’s people that are scary.
“We were in a World War II DC-3 cargo plane flying into a cocaine dealer’s airstrip in the middle of the Colombian Amazon (trying) to hide from the rebels. We were looking for the Rio Apaporis caiman (a crocodile). Caimans don’t scare me, the malaria doesn’t scare me, the anacondas that we caught there don’t scare me. What scares me is the rebels that deal in human trafficking and cocaine and have the ability to kill us and hide us in the Amazon at any time.”
Galante and his wife are taking a short break as they just became parents of a baby boy, and Galante estimates they have about 91 animals on their property in Santa Barbara, Calif. “We rescue pretty much anything that needs a home,” he says.
