I agree with the indigenous people of Alaska that leaving wild animals alone is the best way to protect them sometimes. Humans should leave them alone and then they will leave us alone. Treadwell invaded their home, getting in the way when they were eating, sleeping, fighting and everything else. How annoying would that get! Someone following you around trying to touch you and talk to you and weird voices; I would want to eat the guy too! For the bears who got used to Treadwell, they received a false understanding that all humans are non-threatening, so when a hunter or poacher comes around, they will no longer have their natural instincts to avoid the attacker of fight back. So Treadwell's attempts backfired and did the opposite of saving the bears. Treadwell was dillusional thinking that he was saving the bears. He was on a reserve and there was no issues of poaching. He didn't even need to be there.
However, it is amazing that Treadwell lasted as long as he did. He managed to capture amazing footage of wild life that filmers could only dream of. He was successful in showing the beauty and the true reality of nature. Treadwell did leave behind something that was beautiful even though his death was ugly, which was the nature scenes he captured in his video footage. He wasn't a complete failure, just a bit dillusional.
I'm not sure if it's truly fair to blame the death of the bear-loving lovers on Amy's fear of bears. Sure, bears can "sense" fear but how much does that truly affect their behavior and how accurate and ranging is this sense? I agree that overstimulation of the bears in their habitat probably caused them to be more irritable and/or familiarized with friendly humans, but could the bears have possibly had a similar effect on Treadwell in the opposite manner? Maybe Treadwell didn't know that there were dangerous bears around, because all the ones he saw were more gentle with him; when a "mean" bear came around Treadwell didn't act with his natural instincts and paid for it. Do you think the knowledge and footage that Treadwell walked away from the bears with was worth the potential damage he caused them? If the bears weren't truly in any sort of legitimate danger of poachers and hunters prior to Treadwell, doesn't it logically follow that there won't be hunters after Treadwell? Therefore, I doubt that there was any real harm done to the bears by Treadwell's actions (and I feel as though if there had been a real issue, Alaskan park officials would have found Tim and given him the boot),
ReplyDeleteAll that being said, I still think this post is cool, and it's fun to think about things from a different perspective. Your empathetic thoughts on the bears and how they would react to Treadwell was funny and spot on to how I would feel. But that raises a strange question. If we can sympathize with these bears and understand how an annoying weirdo with a camera would upset them, then does it just take someone who is just not a weirdo to fit in with them? I vote that we cast off someone who is extremely normal into the Alaskan frontier for 13 summers and record the bears reactions to find out!