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Home Page We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts. Animal Defenders of Westchester |
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Irwin's death a sobering reminder By ERIC SHARP Buffalo News Outdoors Page
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060910/1036851.asp When Steve Irwin, TV's "Crocodile Hunter," was killed by a stingray off
his native Australia last weekend, a lot of people reacted with surprise. What surprised me was that it took this long for him to push his luck too
far.While Irwin held himself out as a protector and defender of wildlife, he
made his living exploiting and harassing animals for a television show. His up-close-and-personal exploits with dangerous creatures like
crocodiles and poisonous snakes sent an utterly wrong message to people who
watched the programs, especially children. I haven't figured out how Irwin managed to get so close to a stingray
that it could shove an 8-inch barbed stinger into his heart. In order to get
stuck by a ray, you have to be inches away from it. I know that because
once, while showing some people how easy it was to get 10 cents worth of
hook and leader back after catching a small stingray, I got careless and the
ray stabbed me through the hand. The point of the 6-inch stinger entered the web between my thumb and
forefinger and came out of my palm near the wrist, and I got to spend a
night in a hospital and several weeks being treated by a hand surgeon. The reason I got stuck wasn't because rays are dangerous, but because I
did something very stupid. And by the way, all those stories you've heard
about how excruciatingly painful a ray sting is? Believe them. Irwin's chest must have been nearly touching the ray for him to sustain
that kind of injury, and I suspect it must also have happened in very
shallow water, where a normally unaggressive stingray would feel threatened
by a big and potentially dangerous animal swimming over it. Whenever I saw Irwin on TV, using his head to tease a crocodile or
poisonous snake into striking, I would think of Timothy Treadwell, the
self-anointed "Grizzly Man" who set himself up as a "protector" of grizzly
bears in a part of Alaska where there was no need to protect them. Treadwell, who claimed to have a special "friendship" with grizzlies,
would camp among them, and his shtick was to get on Dave Letterman or some
other TV show by showing videos of himself way closer to grizzlies than was
allowed by the rules of the national parks where he camped. Park officials knew what he was doing, yet refused to stop him. Everybody
just kind of laughed off Crazy Tim's antics until the day he got himself and
his girlfriend killed and eaten. I sometimes wondered how long it would take before Irwin made the same
mistake. Now we know. In the course of a long career of dealing with lots of wild animals, I've
been bitten by a chimpanzee, several species of monkeys, a bottle-nosed
dolphin , a fur seal, weasels, a baby leopard, squirrels, a coyote and more
species of fish and birds than I can remember. In almost every case we were
doing something that the animals didn't like. We all tend to be so fascinated with wild animals that we forget why we
put that adjective before "animals." Steve Irwin kept animals in a zoo and charged people to come in to see
him and other employees treat them like dangerous toys. The very name of the
film he was making at the time he died, "The Ocean's Deadliest," should tell
you that this was just another exploitative, sensationalist effort aimed at
the Reality TV generation. Irwin's death should be a lesson to anyone who spends time where animals
are still wild. We call them wild for a reason, and we need to give them the
space and respect they deserve. Fair Use Notice: This document may contain
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