Been A While....and Recent Watchings

After a long hiatus, I return to purge my thoughts on a couple things.

We watched "Grizzly Man" last night after having it on our DVR forever. It was an interesting documentary about a troubled man who, in an attempt to fight and conquer his demons, went to live with the grizzly bears of Alaska for over 13 summers. The last summer he was there, he and his girlfriend, Amie, were mauled to death by a bear. After watching the film I can't decide if Timothy Treadwell was a good guy or a bad guy.

He was good in the sense that he was bringing these bears to the forefront and letting people see a side of them that they probably wouldn't get to see otherwise. He went to schools and did presentations for free, just to get the word out there.

On the bad side, I think he was desensitizing the bears...and foxes...to humans. Some of these bears would approach him and allow him to touch them. The fox dens he camped by became part of his extended family. They would eat out of his hand and allow him to pet them frequently. This has the possibility of being very damaging to these animals by making them not as fearful of humans as they should be.

The part of the movie that really bothered me was when he re-routed the river so that the bears could access the fish more easily in a time of little rain fall. Tampering with nature and the natural order of things is totally out of bounds in my opinion. Yes, the bears were starving and forced to eat their own young because of this. Yes, this is sad, but this is the way nature works sometimes. I am not naive enough to think that some of these problems with the "natural order" of things is not due to humans, but still, it's wrong to change it.

At the end of the day, I am not going to be one of those people that say that Tim and his girlfriend "got what they deserved" or that "they were asking for it". As the post film discussion mentioned, no one deserved to get pulled apart by a bear and eaten. But, these are wild animals and I think Tim Treadwell forgot that after a while. He truly thought that he was a bear and was somewhat invincible against them.

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Another film I finally got around to watching was "Earthlings". You can find it by a simple search on videos.google. This is definitely a must watch for everyone. A lot of the information I already knew, being a tree-hugging hippie and all. But it was still eye-opening to watch.

It brings to light how we exploit and use animals in almost all aspects of our lives. For food, for clothing, for entertainment, etc. It is a very hard film to watch at certain points. In fact, Dana couldn't even watch the whole thing, but I forced myself to, even with tears in my eyes.

One phrase uttered towards the end of the film really stuck with me and it was this: Humans are the only animal that inflict pain on other animals, knowing full well that it is causing pain and suffering. This may not be the exact quote, but it was basically the point. And it's true. Humans inflict pain fully knowing that the animal is feeling pain, yet we do it anyway. We also inflict this pain for our own amusement. Just look at any circuses, rodeos or the bull fighting in Spain. No other animal on Earth behaves this way. And we are the so called "higher intelligence" right??

I'm not trying to convert people to vegetarianism/veganism but after watching this film please tell me how you can look at that Thanksgiving turkey the same way again.