I like David Attenborough's nature docos. I love the photos of wildlife etc. Two recent photos in a melbourne newspaper upset me and my grand-daughter cried along with me. Yes,it's nature,the hunter and the hunted. One photo depicted this massive seal with anger in its eyes and its mouth wide open showing its glaring sharp teeth. Just in front of its mouth was a tiny miniscule penguin facing the end of its existence. Tears welled up in me. To see a life about to be ended is so brutal,so sad. Such photos are adults only viewing in my opinion. The same sadness overwhelmed me when a tiring sick elephant was brought done by about seven lions. OK,don't look. But sometimes one is caught unexpected. I mean the most awarded and prized photo in the world still stands as the little Vietnamese girl running naked along a road screaming in distress during that war. I just dunno.
As far as kids are concerned Sheed it's a bit of a balancing act, they need to find out at some stage that life ain't a bed of roses, if they don't they're in for some horrible shocks in adult life.
does she know where sausages come from? A funny thing my 3yr old grandaughter told me a while ago was that she and her dad had rat for lunch on the bbq yesterday pop. When asking the son-in-law about it, he told me they had chicken kebabs but when she asked him what they were he told her "rat". She ate them and didn't say anymore about it till we visited the next day.
I grew up on a farm where animals were slaughtered for meat. No slaughter equals vegetarianism. We have to be realistic, and we also have to take responsibility for taking their life for our food.
We humans have an understanding (well some of us do) that the animals should be treated as kindly as possible... seals are just hungry, and cameramen can be just as hungry for a sensational shot.
Yes GD. I would love to shoot images like that but maybe as far as screening them on TV the stations could put a GI next to the channel ID Water Mark, that way you would know throughout the program there is "Graphic Images".
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I agree with you Sheeds and would think that the television people would have the nous to put warnings during prime time.
But, on the other hand, I do believe that the children of today lead cloistered existences. I watched a programme on the idiot box where kids thought milk actual comes from cartons and had no idea where sausages came from. I guess my old man wanted us kids to grow up understanding things. We went fishing, rabbitting, and holidayed on relatives farms where we got involved in slaughtering and cutting up of beasts. My first was a pig and I didn't eat pork for a few years afterwards. I love pork now!
I always remember being out with the old man and he would always point out things like a spider hunting and eating an insect, how a Kestrel would pounce on a mouse and, probably the most thrilling, a Peregrine Falcon taking pigeons on the wing whilst we were pruning roses in the front yard of suburban Melbourne.
I know there is nothing wrong with feeling disgust at some of those scenes and I know there is nothing wrong with not wanting to gut and skin a rabbit, but I also know that we should all, to a certain degree become inured or case hardened to realities, and at an earliest age as possible.
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I agree that many of us living cloistered existences, buying our meat neatly and hygienically packaged from supermarkets, is responsible for our shock/horror at seeing the reality of nature on wildlife documentaries. We don't live in a world created by Walt Disney. To believe so only makes it more difficult to accept reality when it inevitably confronts us. That said, I still refuse to eat a fish with its head intact. Hehe.
There was a docco on a couple of weeks ago about concentrated animal feeding lots and the problems with them. If you had seen the pictures of cattle with a plastic "port" embedded in their sides so that the farmer could reach in and unclog the gunk in the cows stomach it would probably put you off Maccas for life. One of the big problems with these cattle is the amount of e coli infection in the meat too.
A weird mind that could imagine that a cleaned chicken on display in a supermarket is "nude" and "sexy" is more of a turn-off than anything one might encounter on a wildlife program.
Same here. Just finished a number of years in senior executive positions with a national hunting organisation (will always be an avid conservationist) and the blinkered attitudes or plain stupidity of many people, particularly the majority of the Greens, has never ceased to amaze me. Those that can't handle the realities of nature are welcome to stick their heads in the sand but they have no right to inflict their blinkered attitudes on real people.
Darrell
Darrell
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Love the bush & our native environment. Conservationist, not a bloody Greenie.