Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/30/bear-biologist-analyzes-grizzly-man.html
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Wild animals are wild animals. Respect them instead of protecting your narcissistic need.
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From Gail Sherman!
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"Everyone knew his behavior was endangering himself and the bears he so loved, but no one seemed to do much about it. "
What should they have done?
Revoked his woods priviledges?
Since he seems to have made this his religion, what could anyone have done that wouldnt result in him doubling down?
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… Patrick Dykstra had a mother sperm whale leave her calf with him while she went hunting
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I remember that movie, and the mixed feelings it increased for me about Herzog himself.
He’s a great advertiser for himself, a self mythologizer, which might be a good thing, or a bad thing. I mean, building his own legend, which he does in interviews with a lot of storytelling and exaggeration, does help promote his movies, which I think often deserve promotion. But I wonder just how much of self-aggrandizing egomaniac he is.
And I wondered again when watching him listen in this movie to that horrific audio. And then telling a woman, a relative of Treadwell iirc, that she should never listen to it. Oh how supposedly brave of you to listen to it, I thought, and how paternalistic of you to tell a woman to never do so.
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Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me. In my Torts class in law school, we studied the Brandon Teena case (his mother had sued the county for wrongful death), and the decision included some excerpts from the sheriff’s interrogation (in the guise of taking a victim’s statement) of Brandon, and I got to wondering if that interrogation had been recorded and if it was as bad as it sounded on paper. So I made the mistake of Googling it. It was recorded, and it is online, and I listened to a good portion of it. It was so much worse than the court decision made it out to be, and the court decision made it seem pretty bad. Anyway, I have since decided that when I get curious about disturbing things, I should probably just let that go. It’s morbid curiosity and it’s not a healthy impulse to indulge. I think you’re right, though. Herzog did that (a) out of morbid curiosity, and (b) to make himself the brave sacrificer who listened to it so they could tell someone else not to. He does make good movies, though.
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I thought that too at the time I watched it (on a Saturday morning when we used to live across the road from the art house cinema) but even then I also thought he was right about that.
I also get that it is difficult for an artist to make the correct decision in that situation which is to allow a person’s tragic death maintain whatever dignity and privacy we can offer.
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I’ve been up to Katmai and talked with guides up there. By all accounts Tradwell was a menace. Nice enough guy, but believed he had a special magic relationship with the bears and only he could understand and protect them. In reality, he was supremely lucky (for a while) and was doing the opposite of conservation, actively putting the bears at risk.
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I think the problem is in telling her to not listen to it. A better way to handle that situation is to say something like, “I’m not going to tell you to not listen to it, but it’s really disturbing, and I wish I hadn’t listened to it.” That’s a warning without being paternalistic about it.
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I believe that the Greeks called this ‘hubris’, and wrote a number of plays about how it only ever ends one way.
There was a post on BoingBoing recently about the guy who kept a warthog that he thought was his special best friend (until it wasn’t). And then there were Siegfried and Roy, and the woman in Connecticut whose pet chimpanzee ended up tearing her friend’s face off, and so on and so forth. Anyone who claims a “special magic relationship” with an animal that’s more powerful than they are is probably headed for a mauling, sooner or later.
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Yup. And something something pit bulls. 
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You’re coming for my puppy now?
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No. Just thinking that some day, as for other owners of extremely powerful animals, it could come for you.
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My brother-in-law said a very similar thing to me after he watched the horrific Nick Berg video. His exact words were, “Dude, whatever you do, do not watch that video. I did, and now I wish I hadn’t.” I never took his words to be condescending or authoritarian. I figured he was doing me a favor and sparing me the trauma.
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Ringu (the Ring) is calling.
Do. Not. Watch. That. Video!
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YOU LOOKED! 
damn, it’s been nice knowin’ ya, Min…
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She’s our third pittie mix. And the sweetest yet.
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