I kinda had the impression that Europe had been picked over for so many centuries that there wasn’t a whole lot of unmanaged wildlife left. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Irwin’s detractors remind me of people who dislike Emeril Lagasse because his technique is imperfect and his personality over-the-top. Showmanship borne of genuine passion has the capacity to reach people in ways that academic exactitude cannot. Intellectual types often fail to realize it’s the visceral experience that draws people in - the thing itself, not the knowledge about it.
Anyway, I seriously doubt that kids watching his shows are taking notes on terminology; his talent was for lighting fires. And yes, he did offer the standard “don’t try this at home” warning.
Dying as he did is probably an important part of his legacy as well.
Well from one of the links over in MPSIMS, it sounds like the ray was not just sitting on the bottom.
The operative word is stopped, meaning it was swiming and got spooked. Now was he fucking with it, or just swiming near it? No way to tell without seeing the video.
Sustainable harvesting is only debatable in the same sense that evolution is a debatable issue.
To spell that out in simple terns for you: real biologists debate the details, they don’t debate that it exists, has existed and can continue to exist. And people like you and Irwin pretend that it doesn’t exist at all.
That is simply one irrefutable and indisputable example, there are countless others. Are you really trying to say that Irwin was correct that no animal has ever been saved through because of sustainable harvesting?
So by that I have to assume that you believe that spiders and snakes are apex predators? :rolleyes:
There is no opinion involved. Spiders are not apex predators. Numerous species have been saved through sustained harvesting. These are points of fact, not matters of opinion.
I appreciate now that you are grossly ignorant on these matters, that doesn’t excuse your disseminating that ignorance and suggesting that what is firmly established scientific fact is simply opinion.
:rolleyes:
I have provided every reference that kambuckta has requested, while he has provided no references whatsoever for his claims. And yet he tries to imply that I have no real facts and stats.
kambuckta I have been studying this issue for over 20 years. Rest assured I am not without facts. Hell if you want to do this properly let’s take this to GD and see who really has facts at their disposal? Are you up for the challenge?
No, I didn’t think so.
I appreciate that you are upset at both Irwin’s death and the realisation that your dead hero was a fraud, but that doesn’t excuse your spreading ignorance on the SDMB. It also doesn’t excuse your claim that I have no to support my position when I have provided all the references you have requested and will gladly provide any others you may desire.
On this issue there are no shortage of facts, and they are all on my side.
Roll your eyes all you want, that still doesn’t make this Great Debates. Blake has said enough, and succintly enough, and the condom analogy makes perfect sense.
I’m sorta glad this was opened in the Pit, as I didn’t want to piss in the other threads - Irwin was a grandstanding idiot with no real value outside “entertainment” - not fit to carry Gerald Durrell’s butterfly net or Attenborough’s binoculars. He was a glorified zookeeper, not a scientist (like Durrell, but with none of the grace and charm), yet people are expected to take his (very misguided) views on sustainable harvesting and culling seriously?
I really doubt many people end up becoming zoologists or conservationists because of his Paul Hogan-ripoff antics.
Tough that he died, but his shows remain what they were - mass entertainment disguised as education.
That is precisely the point. Despite the fact that pretty much all large mammals and birds in western Europe are managed there are still large mammals and birds in western Europe. More specifically there are large mammals and birds of the type that were preserved by the nobility for their hunts. Large mammals and birds that weren’t so protected were either exterminated through indiscriminate hunting or destroyed as vermin.
It was sustainable harvesting that allowed the survival of much of Europe’s wildlife. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yet Irwin repeatedly stated, despite the incontrovertible facts, that no such thing existed and that no animal was ever saved through this management technique. And apparently Kambukta also believes this, which is astounding.
Quite clearly both these people are totally ignorant of the facts.
He didn’t “have it coming”. As someone who very carefully extracted venom from thousands of snakes in my younger years, I often cringed when I saw the way Irwin handled dangerous reptiles. It wasn’t that I feared that anyone was going to try to duplicate his exploits. Watching him capture poisonous snakes with just his hands brought back memories of a co-worker who experienced several life-threatening bites as the result of Irwin-like snake-handling methods. Irwin’s adventures on TV have been a testament to his intimate knowledge of the behavior of these animals, his incredibly fast and sure hands, and amazingly good luck. Had he died as the result of a rattlesnake or viper bite, perhaps a case could be made that he “had it coming”, but so far, this sounds like a freak accident resulting from mere proximity to a generally innocuous animal.
As for his impact on conservation, I believe he was fairly effective at helping some unnoticed or maligned creatures join the ranks of “charismatic mega-fauna”, which can only help in conservation and habitat preservation efforts. I agree with Blake that he had a loose grasp of some of the facts, but I feel he made a positive contribution with his enthusiasm and self-promotion.
I’m always amused whenever some pop-culture phenomenon is declared to have caused countless children to decide that “learning is cool”. It’s such a weirdly naïve argument; does anyone know a scientist who started studying their subject after being inspired by some TV star? I find this need to such justifications for people’s existence bizarre. He was a TV star. That’s all. I find it particularly incomprehensible that people are reporting that they’ve been crying over his death. He was a C-list celebrity with a TV show. Sure, you’ll miss his TV show, but is it really going to leave that much of a hole in your life?
I just don’t understand this kind of celebrity-worship at all.
Do you mean “will lead to the loss of species”? Because if you mean individual animal deaths, I’m not really sure how “sustainable harvesting” (the killing of individual animals) adds up to saving the lives of individual animals.
If you’re going to talk “culling” and “population control”, what you’re really talking about is selective mismanagement of predator populations, since in nature animal do not need to be culled.
As an aside, Blake, do you recognize that you’re pretty intimidating on these boards? You come on really strong, smacking down posters and laying down absolute views of what is and isn’t truth about nature.
I know three people who enrolled in forensic science degrees solely because of the success of CSI and associated ripoffs.
And there are apparently many more. I’ve read in severalplaces that forensic science courses across the English speaking world have been massively oversubscibed for the last few years.
I don’t. One gets interested in what one is exposed to. Therefore the heavy exposure of a show like CSI (which I’ve never seen) should lead to more people seeing that field as an interesting one to pursue.
Really, it’s just basic marketing theory applied to the career track.
Disagree. I’ve seen various figures as to the number recorded stingray deaths. The number seems to be low: I think I’ve heard 19 and 30 so far. But how many animals (as a percentage) kill anyone at all? Not only that, but probably 2 metre stingrays kill extremely few people because very few people are foolhardy enough to interact with them. Most people will never have the opportunity at all, and will swim very fast in the other direction if they get that opportunity.
In short, Irwin was a bit unlucky, but let’s not pretend that he was in mere proximity with a generally innocuous animal. He was in deliberate interaction with a mildly dangerous animal. Do that often enough and sooner or later your number will come up.
You are a goat farmer in Zimbabwe. Leopards kill your goats. Hunting leopards is illegal… but only if you get caught and there are no police or wildlife officers within 100 km of you. You know of three leopards on your land. How many leopards will you kill?
You are a goat farmer in Zimbabwe. Leopards kill your goats. Hunting leopards is legal via a licensed quota. You know of three leopards on your land. You can accept US$5000 to guide rich American tourists to kill one of the leopards on your land. If you leave the other two leopards they will breed and next year you can collect another $5000. How many leopards will you kill?
Quite clearly sustainable management has saved the lives of two individual leopards who otherwise would have been shot on sight.
Whatever may or may not be the case in this ambiguous state-of-existence called “nature” we have to deal with the real world. In the real world where there is no “nature” left on any major landmass and hasn’t been for several thousand years.
In the real world animals do need to be culled.
In the real world “culling” and “population control” are not mismanagement of anything (or more accurately they do not need to be and usually are not)
I really can’t speak for how things are in “Nature”, but that’s the state of play in the real world where I live and work.
To me your position here seems to be little different to calling condoms a “mismanagement of fertility options”, since if people would just stop having sex outside of marriage nobody would ever contract HIV. It might be true in some ideal world but it just isn’t applicable to reality.
Simply untrue. I can’t, don’t and never will speak for what is and isn’t the truth in nature. I’ve never been there.
I do lay down absolute views of what is and isn’t truth in the real world. I don’t see that as being some sort of flaw on the SDMB. If someone like Irwin or kambukta says something that is ignorant and I have facts and evidence that prove this to be the case I will say so. Isn’t that essentially what we are here for?
And as for smacking down, kambukta requested references and I politely supplied them. The only response was that goddamn roll eyes smiley, ignorant rubbish and an assertion that I hadn’t provided any refernces at all. So yeah, he got smacked down. If he wants to try that shit in the pit he’ll get a smackdown. If he’s real lucky it’ll only be me and Mr. Dibble (Hi Mr D).
Compared to what he would have got if he’d posted the same sort of rubbish about Bush or evolution, kambukta got off lightly.
Fred Rogers had a TV show. I cried over his death. Charles Schulz drew a comic strip. I cried over his death. Warren Zevon was a rock musician. I cried over his death. I didn’t rank them according to other TV personalities, cartoonists or musicians, like I should have said, “Yeah, but Peanuts sucked for the last ten years or more, so no real loss.”
I mourned them because each of them had an impact on my life through their work, and how they lived their lives. Rogers influenced me to enjoy learning. Schulz influenced me to find humor in defeat. Zevon’s example convinced me that one can overcome addiction without losing creativity. Irwin influenced many to appreciate animals that are not cute and cuddly. He was a personality, not just a TV star, and those others were personalities as well.
And, the circumstances of their deaths had additional impacts. Rogers died just as Gulf War 2.0 was getting started. Zevon quit smoking, got cancer anyway, outlived his prognosis and then died anyway. Schulz’s death was weirdly timed: hours before his last strip appeared in newspapers. Irwin died as the result of a freak encounter with an animal he didn’t even know was there, after years of negotiating with dangerous animals that he did know were there, and knew how to placate. So there’s another level of “Why now? Why like this?”
(And just par avance, when Ruth Rendell dies, I am going to lose it. Who? you ask? Doesn’t matter. She means a great deal to me.)
I don’t think we’re really disagreeing all that much. I considered his interactions with poisonous snakes foolhardy, and snake bites (some of them) are much more likely to be fatal than stingray stings. He flirted with death repeatedly with his on-camera free-hand captures of deadly snakes. Death is a normal, expected result of a snake bite in a remote area, while death from a stingray sting is an unusual result. Poisonous snakes DO bite if you grab them and miss, while stingrays can often be touched with impunity. That was the point I was trying to make. As for stingrays, they are, in my experience, fairly common along the coast of Florida. Thousands of people swim among them every day without knowing it. I have snorkeled among them, touched them, even stepped on one without injury. There’s a place in Grand Cayman where people pay to swim among them and feed them by hand. I’m not sure of the details of what happened to Irwin. It’s hard to imagine a scenario that would result in a sting to the chest that didn’t involve a bit of foolhardiness, but it’s possible he simply brushed against a buried ray while swimming in shallow water.
Since this is the pit and all I’d just like to take this opportunity to pit “stupid ass co-worker” who fails to comprehend what he’s heard/read and passes on incorrect information.
This morning he barges into the office to be the first to proclaim “Did ya hear?! The crocodile hunter guy is dead! He got killed by a scorpion!!”
Dumbass, get the story straight before you make a fool of yourself.
One of my co-workers was literally gloating. She giggled as she spread the news, hardly able to contain her glee. She is also one of the ones who usually wears her Christianity on her sleeve.
Googling “human mortality crocodiles” revealed this cite.
An interesting quote:
So, it would seem, one village, in one year, suffered a number of deadly crocodlike attacks equalling about half of the number of stingray attacks ever recorded. Mr. Irwin played with very dangerous animals, the Stingray being far down the list of likely deadly threats, it would seem.