It wasn't just the girfriend, apparently he has a couple of other deaths attributed to his silly approach to bears...
Forgetting to treat animals like animals isn't safe -- or even sane
MIKE DOOGAN
COMMENT
(Published: October 12, 2003)
A couple of recent stories highlight the continuing inability of some people to understand animals, or the proper relationship between them and humans.
One, of course, is the death of Timothy Treadwell, who was killed and eaten by a bear last week in Katmai National Park and Preserve.
Treadwell had made a career of behaving dangerously around brown bears: getting too close, touching them, naming them. He went into the wild with no protection against bears, telling friends he thought he knew the bears so well he didn't need it.
He also wrote and spoke a lot of nonsense about the bears, on one memorable occasion calling them "party animals" on a television talk show, as if they were frat boys in fur coats.
If this nonsense had only killed Treadwell, we could simply write his behavior off as suicide by bear. But it didn't. It also killed his companion, Amie Huguenard, and, so far, two brown bears. I'm sorry, but I don't know what names Treadwell may have given the dead bears.
The damage done by Treadwell's misguided beliefs is apparently not limited to this incident. Treadwell had himself filmed behaving foolishly and wrote a book about his exploits. According to one of his critics, this impressed a couple in Glacier National Park so much that they imitated him by going off into the brush and were killed by a bear.
And, God help us, Treadwell apparently spent some of his time "teaching" schoolchildren about bears. There's no telling how many others he had encouraged to be stupid about brown bears.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the presses gearing up to print the inevitable book lionizing Treadwell and his loony behavior. He's not without defenders. Joel Bennett, an Alaska wildlife filmmaker who should know better, compared him to Dian Fossey.
Let's see. Fossey was a trained naturalist. Treadwell wasn't. She was studying shy, vegetarian mountain gorillas and trying to protect them from poachers. He was messing around with some of the most aggressive meat eaters on the planet. She was murdered, probably by poachers. He was killed and eaten by a bear. So you can see how Bennett could think the two were alike.
Treadwell had been warned many times that his behavior was dangerous. He replied that he preferred to die as part of a bear's meal. But a tape recording of part of the fatal bear attack shows he changed his mind, calling on Huguenard to come and help him. According to the evidence at the site, she did and was killed herself.
If Treadwell went looking for death, and didn't like what he found, in his native state of California there are others who don't like what they find and threaten others.
Some of them plant bombs at companies they claim use animals in scientific tests. Others set fires at meat-packing plants. And a group that calls itself Gourmet Cruelty is liberating ducks to keep them from being force fed to produce foie gras. Someone -- someone too cowardly to claim responsibility -- has also vandalized a restaurant and threatened a chef over the use of foie gras.
Foie gras is French for fat liver. It is considered a delicacy. Farmers produce it by force-feeding domestic fowl, male ducks and geese. The practice has been going on since the ancient Egyptians. There is no evidence the practice hurts the fowl, which are going to be killed anyway.
So what's the objection? Like Treadwell with the bears, animal rights activists anthropomorphize the practice, arguing that since humans wouldn't like to be force fed through a tube, ducks and geese don't like it either.
That seems to be debatable, duck and goose physiology being quite different from human. But even if it's not, so what? Why do you suppose ducks and geese exist? To write philosophical treatises?
Nope, they exist to be eaten. If we don't eat them, something else will, even if it's only worms. And they don't have human thoughts or feelings, so trying to superimpose our experience and our values on them is as foolish as thinking you can live safely among the bears.
The animal rights activists have nothing to offer but vegetables and mushy thinking. They're welcome to both, until they act criminally. That should get them jail time. I'm sure they won't be offended by any foie gras in the stony lonesome.
