I’m totally unable to sleep right now because I just watched what felt like 10 minutes of slow motion baby wildebeest death-by-crocodile. Why do they do that? I mean I get showing the whole thing, the good and the bad, but why slow it down, why zoom in, why PLAY THE AGONIZING AUDIO while the poor thing squeals in pain and terror?
Argh!!!
Oh, that weepy music wasn’t added by them. It occurs in nature.
Glad I could clear that up.
This wildebeest was getting torn apart and its mom was on the bank bleating and shuffling around trying to help… god I could cry all over again…
Snuff films are okay when it’s animal vs animal, I guess.
It’s helpful context next time you hear about the inhumane treatment of domesticated livestock.
Yes, it has a point to make. These are supposed to be documentaries. Every documentary shows the nice bits of nature in slow motion, zoomed in and with the audio playing. We don’t see birds singing filmed from half a mile away with the sound off. Or bighorn sheep fighting as a silent movie of two dots on a mountainside. The pretty bits are always shown in slow motion, close up, with full stereo sound.
The problem with that is that it has given people a very rosy view of nature. As though every animal lives a full and happy life, and it’s all either beautiful and serene or majestic and noble. Nothing could be further than the truth. fully 1/3 of all wildebeest die a gruesome death before they see their first birthday. 99.9% of them die a gruesome death of some sort.
It’s good for people to see the brutal side of nature. It gives them a sense of perspective.
I remember in the documentary Grizzly Man how horrified that Timothy Treadwell guy was to find that one of the bears he (felt he) had bonded with so well turned around and devoured one of its own cubs. It was clear that he was thinking of them as people, and seemed to have the same reaction as you might if you ran across the bones of a baby your best friend had recently gnawed on.
That is real life in the wild - nasty, brutal and short.
I saw an IMax documentary on African herd migration and there was a similar scene. And the whole time, I could hear the woman behind me muttering, “Oh, now why did they have to show that??” over and over with other sounds of cringing and disapproval.
I really had to fight the urge to turn around and tell her, “Because that’s how life for a wildebeast IS. Surely you had to know when you sat down that this was a documentary and not some Disney flick.”
Ironically, it’s a distorted view of the life of an animal. They have to shoot dozens, if not more, attempted kills before shooting a successful one. Apparently they think the viewers are bloodthirsty enough that they would be bored if they showed more than a 50/50 ratio of successful ones for the prey vs predator. For a long time it made me wonder how any prey animals at all could survive more than a day before I learned that predators are not nearly as successful when they attack as “documentaries” would have you believe.
I was watching (what seemed like) a lighthearted documentary about a family of ducks that lived in a large city. It followed them around for weeks and documented their adaptation to city life, etc. Then, at the end of the documentary, the announcer said, “Sadly, shortly after this was filmed, a freak thunderstorm hit the city and all of the ducks were swept down a storm drain to their deaths”. WTF?
Hmmm… the universe just doesn’t care about baby wildebeests. What about the crocodile? It benefitted from eating the wildebeest. Would you be upset if you saw a starving crocodile who was going to die? That’s the way the universe works. Fortune and misfortune are in the eyes of the beholder. The wildebeest species as a whole benefits because now, the baby’s genes will no longer be in the gene pool to be passed along to other slow-moving wildebeests. It’s a constant arms race.
Really?
I would have thought an animal that unsuccessfully expended that much energy frequently would die pretty soon - it burns a lot of calories to even fail at taking down a wildebeest.
Whilst I agree that death is a natural part of life and so should be shown in a documentary about wildlife, it doesn’t need to be made overly melodramatic in the way it is today (with the sad music and slow motion photography). I think that is what the OP is referring to, not that she objects to death being shown at all.
Some people flipped over the scene in the feral horse documentary “Cloud” where a foal is born malformed and can’t stand. Because the mare won’t leave the foal, Cloud, the lead stallion, stomps the foal to death.
Nature, red in tooth and claw.
The question wasn’t why crocodiles eat baby anythings.
The question was why do nature programs show every detail with agonizing sound effects and close-ups.
The answer is not that they are portraying nature accurately as it happens. Most of life- ours and animals’- is boring and uneventful.
They show this suffering and death so that it will cause an emotional reaction and get the viewer’s adrenalin pumping. So you will remember the program and talk about it- as we are doing here.
If you feel like this is a device to manipulate your emotions and jerk you around, you’re right: it is.
Closeups of baby birds and cubs playing manipulate your emotions as well. Anything shown in such a program is selected from hours of footage to find the stuff best able to keep the viewer’s attention and elicit a reaction. Welcome to this concept we call “entertainment.”
So you don’t like the selection offered by the director. Fair enough, but you might acknowledge that this particular selection is just as legitimate (or whatever) than the sunset shots of birds soaring and cute portrayals of lion cubs playing. Pretending that a baby wildebeast being devoured by a crocodile is some kind of horrid aberration from the way nature ought to be would be awfully silly, if not downright deluded.
They focus on the lion killing the wildebeest or whatever because that’s what people who watch nature documentaries want to see.
I’m with you, Opal. The idea of an innocent creature (which, to me includes all animals) suffering that way is more than I can bear. I know it happens, but I can’t bring myself to watch it, and why should I? I avoid those kinds of nature programs, not because I’m looking at the world through rose-colored glasses but because I see no need to witness suffering voluntarily when I see enough of it in my day-to-day life.
Quoted for self-fulfilling prophecy.