Meerkat Manor is a British television program

Television program

A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

me produced by Oxford Scientific Films

Oxford Scientific Films

Oxford Scientific Films is a British company that produces natural history and documentary programmes. Founded on 8 July 1968 by noted documentary filmmaker Gerald Thompson, the independent film company broke new ground in the world of documentaries, using new filming techniques and capturing...

 for Animal Planet International

Animal Planet

Animal Planet is an American cable tv specialty channel that launched on October 1, 1996. It is distributed by Discovery Communications. A high-definition simulcast of the channel launched on September 1, 2007.-History:...

 that premiered in September 2005 and ran for four series until its cancellation in August 2008. Blending more traditional animal documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 style footage with dramatic

Dramatic programming

Dramatic programming in the UK, or television drama and television drama series in the US, is television program content that is scripted and fictional along the lines of √a traditional drama. This excludes, for example, sports television, television news, reality show and game shows, stand-up...

 narration, the series told the story of the Whiskers, one of more than a dozen families of meerkat

Meerkat

The meerkat or suricate, Suricata suricatta, is a small mammal belonging to the mongoose family. Meerkats live in all parts of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, in much of the Namib Desert in Namibia and southwestern Angola, and in South Africa. A group of meerkats is called a "mob", "gang" or "clan"...

s in the Kalahari Desert

Kalahari Desert

The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savannah in Southern Africa extending , covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa, as semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains. The Kalahari supports more animals and plants than a true desert...

 being studied as part of the Kalahari Meerkat Project

Kalahari Meerkat Project

The Kalahari Meerkat Project, or KMP, is a long term research project focused on studying the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of cooperative behaviors in meerkats...

, a long-term field study into the ecological causes and evolutionary consequences of the cooperative nature of meerkats.