Leave Them Alone ! > IDEAS & IDEALS

• 목록

 I confirmed belatedly that Steve Irwin, the Australian crocodile hunter and famous TV host to the wildlife programs, died last year of an accident at 44. It was reported that he was stung by a stingray during filming the deadliest animals living under the deep ocean. Still we can see him handling huge and deadly crocodiles on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel. They are still running the films that were made before his death. Soon we will eventually miss for good his lovable face and his trade-mark gesture of giving two thumbs up after finishing his dangerous job well and safe. I feel deeply sorry for his early death.

     As long as I remember Mr. Steve Irwin is one of the first men who created a new fashion in the field of hosting the wildlife documentaries. He was more of an actor and sometimes even a circus clown than a traditional narrator in the Animal Kingdom films. His legendary daredevilry was unsettling me enough. To please the audience he often taunted a ferocious crocodile into temper, for example, played with it, fought it, and subdued it with his bare hands and body at the risk of his own life.

     Following the footsteps of the late Steve Irwin there is another man by the name of Mr. Austin Steven. If the crocodiles were Mr. Irwin's specialty, Mr. Steven's is the snakes. Mr. Steven puts a step further in his daredevilry. He seeks out for a certain kind of venomous snake, spots it, plucks it out from its hiding place, grabs it by the tail with his bare hand, demonstrates how it struggles in his hand to bite him, opens its mouth to show us its deadly fangs with his fingers, let it emit the mortal venom onto his eyes protected only by his sunglasses. He sometimes crawls into the secret lair where hundreds, nay, thousands of rattlesnakes are tangled together, and let some of them crawl over his belly and thighs.

     As a faithful watcher of these wildlife documentaries for over a long period of time I feel always very grateful to those people who are engaged in the making of these programs for their courage, sacrifice and dedication to their work. Whenever I tune on the channel, they take me instantly to a remote nook of the earth where the rare and magnificent animals are: to the Serengeti National Park in Africa, into the Amazon jungles and the rain forests, and even down into the depths of the Caribbean ocean. With a remote controller in my hand, lying comfortably on the sofa, I can travel with them anywhere they go and watch enjoying all kinds of exotic animals of the land, of the water, and of the air without any effort, harm or trouble. These people do all the hard, dangerous and dirty works for me.
  
     By their intrinsic nature these wildlife programs on TV are entertaining as well as educational. They are supposed to teach as well as please us - that is, to make us learn more and understand better about these wild creatures. The audience are expected and exhorted to realize the beauty of these wild animals, to be more sympathetic to them, to love and protect those that are on the brink of extinction due to man's greed, carelessness and ignorance.

     Recently, however, I came to have somewhat a negative or a skeptical view about these wildlife programs on TV in general, and became weary as well as wary of the approaches employed by those persons such as Mr. Steve Erwin and Mr. Austin Steven in hosting the shows. Thanks to the progress of the electronic technology and the advent of high fidelity camera, these programs are much more real, vivid and thrilling than the classical Animal Kingdom films of the past, of course, but there is something that makes me uneasy and uncomfortable about the future of the programs.

     I am afraid if they are not becoming too competitive as well as too commercial all unnecessarily in drawing on the innocent wild animals to catch more audience.  In the name of scientific research and conservation of the endangered species they try to be closer to the wild animals, intrude into their natural habitats, disturb and disrupt their peace, and interfere with their life. Often they even create some artificial, awkward and unnatural situations in which the privacy and dignity of the wild animals are relentlessly violated and degraded. More often than not the animals become a plaything in man's hands.

     More fundamental or even ontological questions arise as to these missionary programs. The fact that we are able to see these wild animals with too much ease in perfect safety anytime through the films can have a very self-defeating and harmful influence on the noble ideas that the film makers uphold, and on the total image of the wild animals. By seeing them too often the audience can be made apathetic to and incurious of the wild creatures. All the myth and mystery associated with these wild, strange, ferocious animals are all gone, and there remain only the creatures that are hopelessly vulnerable, weak, dull and pathetic. I find that  I discover myself watching them with no excitement, wonder, awe, or fear. I sometimes mistake them for domestic animals. They are wild animals no longer to me. I think I must stop watching the films altogether, or abstain from seeing them too much at least. Indeed, too much familiarity breeds contempt.

     It is certain that more surprising, thrilling and even spectacular wildlife programs that would far eclipse the movie Jaws and more daring daredevils who would make Mr. Irwin or Mr. Steven look a chicken will be on TV sooner or later. And consequently and inevitably more of the wild animals will be disturbed, touched, used, and manipulated to satisfy man's unlimited curiosity.

     Leave them alone, and let them live in nature in their own way. Don't try to be too close to them. Don't peep too deeply at them. That is the best way to love and conserve them. Look at DMZ in Korea where no man is allowed to enter since the armistice was signed between the South and the North more than 50 years ago i 1953. It is repoirted to have become a haven for hundreds of plant and animal species no longer existing elsewhere in the peninsula. Where the human present is absent, nature thrives.
                                                                                                       (July 3, 2007)