In which Teeny gets up on her High Horse, resulting in flagrant overuse of the caps lock
I'm so glad Planet Earth is back on BBC1. This is what they should be using my licence fee for (well, this and Dog Borstal on BBC3, which I LOVE)! I did get a little upset at one point however. They had been following this poor old polar bear who had gotten stranded when the sea ice melted prematurely. He'd been swimming around for days, and when he finally found land it was covered in walrus (What is the plural of walrus? Walruses? Walrii?) .
The poor bear was hungry enough to try and catch one of these monsters (walrus, as well as being spectacularly ugly, are also very large and ferocious) and ended up getting speared by a tusk. He wasn't fatally injured but it was enough to stop him walking, which meant he couldn't catch any food, which meant he was just going to lay down and die. David Attenborough's thoughtful voiceover, with the swelling music in the background and the full technicolour glory of the photography on my stupid new TV, was enough to make me burst into tears, not just for this bear, but for ALL THE BEARS. Because it's all OUR FAULT that these lovely aminals are either going to end up becoming extinct or growing fins and not being bears anymore. The arctic sea ice melts faster every year because of global warming, and it's all OUR FAULT.
Anyway, Fiance heard the snuffling coming from the other end of the sofa, looked over and asked in disbelief 'are you CRYING?!'. He doesn't get as emotionally involved in this kind of thing as me. Don't get me wrong, he likes animals, but he's not the kind of person who cried at Animal Hospital.
This was bad enough, but I also found myself welling up on the bus this morning, when I read about the jungle fires in Indonesia that are threatening the country's orangutans. Plantation owners (probably palm oil plantations) are setting fires to clear huge areas of forest, which are driving orangutans out of their natural habitat, many of them having suffered burns (there I go again *sniff*). As if they don't have enough to worry about with illegal logging and poaching, now they are being burnt alive because supermarket chains can't be ARSED to source ecologically sound vegetable oil to provide us with cheap margarine and plantation owners are too CHEAP AND LAZY to chop down the beautiful rainforest the HARD WAY to provide the supermarket chains with the palm oil. *Breathes hard, nostrils flaring and lips pursed*
I've just been and joined WWF because I feel rather strongly about this (as you may have gathered). You can too if you are so inclined, just click here.
**Update: BBC News have caught up on the orangutan problem - I was right about the palm oil thing.
The poor bear was hungry enough to try and catch one of these monsters (walrus, as well as being spectacularly ugly, are also very large and ferocious) and ended up getting speared by a tusk. He wasn't fatally injured but it was enough to stop him walking, which meant he couldn't catch any food, which meant he was just going to lay down and die. David Attenborough's thoughtful voiceover, with the swelling music in the background and the full technicolour glory of the photography on my stupid new TV, was enough to make me burst into tears, not just for this bear, but for ALL THE BEARS. Because it's all OUR FAULT that these lovely aminals are either going to end up becoming extinct or growing fins and not being bears anymore. The arctic sea ice melts faster every year because of global warming, and it's all OUR FAULT.
Anyway, Fiance heard the snuffling coming from the other end of the sofa, looked over and asked in disbelief 'are you CRYING?!'. He doesn't get as emotionally involved in this kind of thing as me. Don't get me wrong, he likes animals, but he's not the kind of person who cried at Animal Hospital.
This was bad enough, but I also found myself welling up on the bus this morning, when I read about the jungle fires in Indonesia that are threatening the country's orangutans. Plantation owners (probably palm oil plantations) are setting fires to clear huge areas of forest, which are driving orangutans out of their natural habitat, many of them having suffered burns (there I go again *sniff*). As if they don't have enough to worry about with illegal logging and poaching, now they are being burnt alive because supermarket chains can't be ARSED to source ecologically sound vegetable oil to provide us with cheap margarine and plantation owners are too CHEAP AND LAZY to chop down the beautiful rainforest the HARD WAY to provide the supermarket chains with the palm oil. *Breathes hard, nostrils flaring and lips pursed*
I've just been and joined WWF because I feel rather strongly about this (as you may have gathered). You can too if you are so inclined, just click here.
**Update: BBC News have caught up on the orangutan problem - I was right about the palm oil thing.
Labels: Environment
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 at 10:34 am.
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Good post. I never know where I stand on this one. I realise that the BBC are trying to capture the circle of life in its unaffected form but is it right to sit back and watch an animal die. Imagine it was one of your poor pussy cats in a struggle with a fox – it would be considered sick to watch it happen let alone film it, yet to the fox this falls well within his natural food chain rights, are you fair to disrupt it and risk the fox starving. Of course man has empathy which we think is a right to disrupt the circle of live, we will save domestic pets from the harsh reality of the food chain and yet not the poor polar bear you saw struggle for it’s life. I’m not criticising the BBC for their actions or lack thereof, I don’t know which is right. . .
I don't think the BBC team should have interfered - nature red in tooth and claw and all that. A polar bear dying because it's been injured and can't hunt is one thing - it's not nice but it's part of life. Any animal dying because humans have destroyed their natural habitat is another - that's what I found upsetting.
But having said all that you're right - I wouldn't stand by and watch if it was one of my cats!
No I realised what your post was saying, it just got me thinking about responsibility man has. Yes when something happens in nature it is a fact of life but the very fact that man is there filming you have got to question what our responsibility is to the creature that is suffering - perhaps, in the end, our responsibility is nothing - I don't know.
No brainer with the destroying of natural habitats I totally disagree but then some will argue that man has to do what he has to do to stay developed at the top of the food chain. . .but I know there is ways to progress and exercise due care.
Good post anyhoo!
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