Protection?

Grizzly Man was entirely different than the documentary I thought we would be watching. As a youngster I enjoyed watching animal documentaries on Discovery channel, National Geographic, and Animal Planet in which I get to learn about the lives of animals I will probably never see. Grizzly Man, to me, was more so a biography of Timothy Treadwell than a documentary. Or maybe it was a biographical documentary? The video brought up a lot of issues relating to interactions between humans and animals, what is an inherent characteristic of nature, and character. Throughout the documentary I think the most difficult thing for me to understand was Treadwell's rational for going back to the Grizzly Maze and the Park each summer to "protect" the bears. According to the ecologist, the bear population can sustain a 6% decrease and still survive, so people are allowed to kill some bears since it contributes millions of dollars to the Alaskan economy. The ecologist also said that the poacher problem is not very large, so why was Treadwell so insistant that he had to protect the bears from poachers who were "sure to come"? I think it was ignorance and a selfish (though maybe not conscious) desire to bring meaning to his own life. He was portrayed as an All-American boy who ran into a lot of problems in college and ultimately spiraled downward because of substance abuse. Supposedly, Treadwell had a "near death experience" with some unknown substance, possible alcohol or cocaine or methamphetamines and decided he needed to "turn over a new leaf". So what does he do? He goes and lives with grizzly bears. Grizzly bears are HUGE. They can weight up to 1500 pounds (three quarters of a ton!), run up to 35mph, and have massive claws and powerful jaws. Why, of all animals that he could "save" would he choose an animal that has a lot of potential to kill him? If he really wanted to do good he would have tried to save an animal that really is endanger of extinction. Grizzly bears are labeled as "Least Concern" which is the lowest level of threat to an animal. Least Concern animals are not labeled as Threatened so Treadwell was protecting an animal that really did not need protection. Also, Treadwell never ran into any hunters during his 13 summers. Not one. All he did was nurture the bears and foxes to be comfortable with humans. He swam with them, petted them, and watched them and talked to them for months. Habituating them to humans only makes them that much more easy for a hunter to kill. Instead of hiding they may walk toward the poacher thinking that he would be like the other bipedal animal he saw, relatively harmless.