My Australian 2 cents

I heard about the death of Steve Irwin as I was getting ready to leave MFM. Seeing that his crazy antics with animals was a favorite amongst furries, news of his death spread rapidly around the hotel. I saw that LJ was clogged with news of his death as well. It only took a day before the first tasteless cartoon of his death was posted and soon the "STFU about the Croc hunter!!" posts started. I guess the whole mass media fascination about his death was because he did lead a very public life and his death was a textbook definition of irony. We all love irony especially in cases like this where he had handled the most deadly animals on the planet from black mambas to sea snakes and here he is done in by one of the more "friendly" species. I suppose the only thing that could have been worse was if he had been mauled to death by a koala.

I turned on the t.v. on Monday night after arriving back home and saw that "The Crocodile Hunter" was scheduled to be broadcast that night. I turned it on to see how Animal Planet was going to handle it. They showed a special episode filmed 2-3 years ago where they had interviewed him and his family about the worldwide phenomenon he had created. It even dug into the subject of him carrying his newborn son into the croc enclosure which caused a media frenzy around the globe. The one thing that struck me the most was the similarity between Irwin and Tim Treadwell a.k.a. The Grizzly Man who was eaten by a bear in Alaska after living among the bears for years. In both cases they "tickled the dragon's tail" for years by putting themselves potentially in harm's way in the name of animal conservation. They dodged the bullet for years until their luck ran out. In both cases their deaths were recorded.

I looked up both Treadwell and Irwin in Wikipedia and saw that neither of them had any formal wildlife, biology, or conservation education. I suppose nature is the best teacher and the nature of science education is sometimes cold and removed, but perhaps there was too much showmanship in both of their lives. While I would love to be able to interact with animals the way they did and even though I am a furry with delusions of grandeur of an anthropomorphic universe where humans and animals live in a world as equals, I also have that pesky little sense of reality.