Please! No more croc wrestling.

IT SEEMS only yesterday I complained that if I saw another programme featuring crocodile/alligator hunters I would scream. Put in your earplugs now.

Vets In The Wild West ended with Steve Leonard and Trude Mostue tussling with several of the reptiles invading the swimming pools and backyards of Florida locals. There are only so many animals and so many ways of showing how they live - and I'm beginning to feel that there's little new left to say and show.

Having exhausted the possibilities at home, Steve and Trude have gone abroad. In North Carolina, they joined a military-style operation to round up 130 wild horses in order to control their breeding. They didn't offer them condoms but a contraceptive vaccine. The idea was to control horse numbers to ensure they had enough to eat and didn't destroy the environment on their uninhabited island.

As you'd expect from the BBC natural history unit, Animals: The Inside Story featured lots of stunning photography and computer imagery showing inside the bodies of the featured creatures. But again, most of it seemed familiar, as though we were watching a Best Of compilation of other programmes.

The subject is the predator and its prey. The idea is to investigate ways in which they tip the balance in their favour to gain the advantage over the other. A tiger in the Indian forest is "a top of the range" hunter. The one we saw was a female who hadn't eaten in five days. "And she's very hungry," said narrator Robert Lindsay, unnecessarily.

To stay alive, one deer is all she needs. She'll get her lunch with the aid of acute hearing, binocular vision and great speed - three attributes that would be handy for humans engaged in the battle of the shopping trolleys down at Tesco's on a Saturday morning.

Only one in ten hunts succeed, we were told. Which left me wondering how they knew these statistics. Is someone sitting in the jungle with a clipboard marking off the tiger's activities?

The peregrine falcon, which can't hide in the empty skies, relies on sheer speed for the element of surprise. The pigeon on the ground earmarked as dinner has eyes in the side of the head, enabling the bird to scavenge for food and keep an eye on the skies for danger at the same time. Most impressive is the python, which slows down its whole system and just waits. The cold snake seems dead but is alive - "only just" - and waiting for its sensors to detect the heat of another creature. Then it knows dinner is ready and comes back to life.

Next time you complain about feeling hungry, spare a thought for pythons. By flirting with death, this snake can survive without a meal for two years.