Croc Hunter Steve Irwin dead at 44...

[Stand_watie]

Regarding a comparison of Steve Irwin to Timothy Treadwell - I'd like to draw an analogy of a well trained and highly motivated U.S. Marine volunteering to go to xyz, and a poorly trained and highly motivated U.S. "human shield" volunteering to go to xyz (wherever some petty tyrant has his military complex threatened by US bombs). Both stand a chance of dying by bomb or by terrorist bullet, but one is doing it with careful training and for a good reason, and one is just being foolish.

Yes, Irwin took a big risk, but it was a calculated risk taken by a pro, with a good, compelling, "redeeming social value". He always cautioned us "don't do this, they are dangerous and will kill you if you slip up!" I haven't seen Treadwell, so perhaps I'm being unfair to him, but my impression from news reports was that his message was "see? They're harmless. Go ahead and feed them twinkies and ho ho's by hand and they'll give you a sweet snuggle in return!"


Steve Irwin took Erica and I places that we will never be able to reasonably expect to be able to safely go, and brought us experiences we can never safely do without having been brought up  from infancy in a zoo around dangerous reptiles. He will be missed in our household, but I don't think his death was in vain, stupid, or meaningless. He died doing what he loved, and bringing an experience to (me and my daughter) the world that the very vast majority would never be able to experience safely without him.

I mourn for his wife and (particularly) his children's loss, but it was not a senseless loss. It was a loss that was perhaps expectable, but it wasn't senseless. I don't know anything about his theology, but if G-d is giving brownie points in the afterlife for giving quality education and entertainment to the masses who can't actually see cobras in africa or crocodiles in australia in real life, he'll definitely get the max score on brownie points.

[crt360]

Stand_watie, well said.  I see it the same way.

[edited to fix my poor spelling of Stand's name]

[Guest]

Score me as another saying "Irwin wasn't a Treadwell".

First point, if you ever saw Irwin actually wrassle a good-sized croc/gator/etc, he had a LOT of help and did it very professionally, not hurting the critter and not only not suffering serious injury himself, but not losing any staff either.

He did genuinely good things for conservation yet was NOT against responsible hunting and is known to have done so himself.  And filmed doing so, although not in later years.

My own experience handling snakes (mostly non-poisonous but a rattler once) and various other reptiles tells me that they're very, VERY predictable.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking along a park trail in California and came upon a 5ft gopher snake just laying there beside the trail.  Huh.  Reached down, petted him, no startlement on his part, picked him up gently, let him slither around on me for a while, put him down again some distance from the trail.  Never got him in a "headlock" or any tight grip, just let him slither and wrap, stayed calm so he'd stay calm, never let him feel a threat, no problem at all...not even a hint that he was going to bite me and I do know those warnings on gopher snakes.  Hadn't run into it in about...lord, 23 years, but some things you don't forget...a snake longer than you are hissing at you is one such.

If you understand how a reptile works you can deal with them quite easily.  As a kid I handled other snakes including a wounded gopher snake about 6ft long that we kept for a time, fed him a lizard or two and cleaned the wound to his side with hydrogen peroxide a few times...he was clearly on the mend, we let him go.  The wound did NOT affect his behavior, which I think is a very important distinction between a reptile and a mammal.

A bear is COMPLETELY different.  It's 1,000x smarter, far less predictable, a far bigger "decision tree branch" going on.  You don't know what kind of mood it's in, if it got turned down by a ladybear yesterday, if it's hungry, has a tummy ache from eating something dead too long or just plain meaner than most...none of which is an issue with a reptile, at least not any I'm familiar with!

What happened to Irwin was a freak accident that really could have happened to -=any=- shallow water recreational scuba diver.  This wasn't "fated to happen", it was ghastly bad luck.  He could have dealt professionally with dangerous reptiles for the rest of his life with no problems.  I don't even hold the "baby incident" against him, the man did know what he was doing.

Didn't know enough about funky flatfish though .

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Something else from the Wikipedia entry on him...there are citations but I haven't checked them myself yet.  Still, if this is correct, it is seriously wrong to disparage this guy:

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Rescued diver

In November of 2003, Steve was filming a documentary on Sea Lions in Baja California Sur, Mexico when reports went over the airwaves of his boat's radio that two scuba divers were reported missing in the area. Steve and the crew dropped everything in the effort of finding the divers. On the second day of the search, kayakers found one of the divers, Scott Jones, perched on the a narrow ledge of rocks over waters with dangerous currents. The kayakers went to Steve's boat for help. Steve and crew arrived on the scene where the crocodile hunter dove into the water with a crew member, scaled the rocks and brought equipment to Jones. Irwin and the crewmember then helped Jones into the water and pulled him to the safety of Irwin's boat. Jones did not recognize his celebrity rescuer.

The other lost diver, Katie Vrooman, was found dead the following day by an airplane not far from Jones' location.[19]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin

http://www.cdnn.info/safety/s031123/s031123.html

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Jim again.  He made the decision to focus the boat on search & rescue and THEN jumps in personally after the people?  And it's not something bandied about all over, I'd never heard of it until I checked Wikipedia?

That's not "acting like a big name star", now is it?  That's pretty damn classy.  From that last link:

"Steve Irwin of Animal Planet (a cable TV network) and the Australian Zoo happened to be in the area with a large boat and crew," Hoover said. "They were there to film the sea lions. Irwin immediately suspended his operation and his divers searched with ours and they took his boat all around the island where the sea lions were. Irwin used his satellite communications set-up to call in a search plane."

[stevelyn]

Why is it always one of the good guys?

[Iain]

I remember seeing an episode of his show in which they were catching, tagging and releasing wild crocs, generally quite big ones. Real different side to his character came out, at certain moments the jovial Aussie disappeared to be replaced by a no-nonsense professional who got extremely pissed at members of the team who put themselves and others in danger by making minor mistakes in an operation that could not afford minor mistakes.

Someone mentioned to me yesterday that this is the first known fatality attributed to a sting ray in Australian waters. Don't if it is true, but if it is, Irwin took bigger risks in the enclosures with his favourite crocs than he was taking the other day.

[280plus]

Fine, I'll stand corrected. I didn't know the man so apparently my impression of him from his TV persona was incorrect. Apologies...

[Iain]

It was me that mentioned Treadwell because I believe there are differences between the type of animal lover that Irwin was, the type that many on this board identify with, and the sort that Treadwell was. Sort of an interesting contrast between two men that some would see as very similar, yet I don't reckon they'd have seen themselves as similar. Don't think anyone was having a dig at you 280, it was just an interesting aspect of the conversation that we raised between us.

[Iain]

Damned Aussies!

Heh. If you were a cricket fan you'd feel even more strongly.

[280plus]

Thanks Iain. I was a little harsh at first there, somewhat tongue in cheek but somewhat not. I recognize his loss as being a great one on many levels, the knowledge up in that head was virtually irreplaceable. I guess I'm a little pissed off at him for taking the chances he did. You just KNEW someday his luck would run out. Them Aussies are driven like that though. I personally lost another less well known but equally as important Aussie a few years back because he would just NOT try to take it easy when he should have. Guess I'm still pissed off about that too.

Damned Aussies!

[Iain]

That's just weird. It looks like I quoted you before you even posted. I swear that post was there before mine was.

[280plus]

heh, sorry. I noticed a grave error inspelling so I copied, deleted ad saved a correction. Cool. Deja vu all over again.

Looking at this post, should I do it again? LOL...

[Dannyboy]

The amazing thing is that of the numerous ways that this guy could have died, he dies on a fluke.  I mean, people don't usually die from stingray barbs.  I don't recall ever hearing of anyone dying in that manner.  That stingray fired off the proverbial "golden bullet."

[wmenorr67]

Heard this morning that this was just the third death from a stingray in over a hundred years in Australia.

[HankB]

Unfortunate death . . .

But you know, the first time I saw him, he was doing some sort of special on "The World's Deadliest Snakes" or something, and I found myself thinking that he was a future Darwin award candidate . . . I mean, he was certainly far, FAR more adept at handling these snakes than I would be, but he seemed very cavalier about the danger. (Familiarity breeds contempt?)

Face it, many wild animals are potentially deadly (Irwin was filiming a "dangerous creatures" video, after all, when he got killed) and can become unpredictable. Look at the lion tamer guy in Vegas (Roy of Siegfried & Roy?) Raised a tiger from a cub, and it damn near killed him. Another guy (Austin Stevens, "Snakemaster") on cable TV was playing with snakes in Africa, trying to take close-up photographs, and got himself bitten on camera by a cobra. (He lived.)

When I was living in Minnesota, a local man was killed when his tame, pet deer - a buck he'd raised from a fawn - gored him and an antler tine penetrated his femoral artery.

Now Irwin.

Very sad, but if you keep taking chances, eventually the odds will catch up.

[seeker_two]

Just goes to show....

You can aggravate animals just so much...then POW!...

Leave them alone....& they'll leave you alone...

[Stand_watie]

..When I was living in Minnesota, a local man was killed when his tame, pet deer - a buck he'd raised from a fawn - gored him and an antler tine penetrated his femoral artery...Very sad, but if you keep taking chances, eventually the odds will catch up.

My dad (who grew up on a dairy farm in rural northern new england) tells a story of another local farmer, a man in his 70's who raised a jersey bull from a calf and got into a small pen with it to feed it himself, despite family/friends telling him it was going to kill him someday (Jersey's are notorious for bad temperment, even though they're small by comparison to other breeds). Sure enough it smashed him up against the fence one day, broke his ribs and he died in the hospital of secondary infection soon after.

[Stand_watie]

Jim March's comment comparing mammals to reptiles is right on I think.

People like to say animals are unpredictable, but I think it's humans who are the least predictable, and that predicability decreases with increasing complexity.

[Guest]

Score me as another saying "Irwin wasn't a Treadwell".

Absolutely. Treadwell lost respect for his "pet" bears, he forgot what they were and what he was to them. Irwin had nothing but respect for the animals that he worked with and *never* pretended that he was in some way "special" so the animals wouldnt hurt him. Irwin loved animals, but he never forgot what they were.

[Sindawe]

First point, if you ever saw Irwin actually wrassle a good-sized croc/gator/etc, he had a LOT of help and did it very professionally, not hurting the critter and not only not suffering serious injury himself, but not losing any staff either.

I dunno, I caught part of a retrospective of Steve Irwin last night on Animal Planet.  It looked like it was just him (VERY young, early 20s?), the dog and the camera.  He'd gone out to capture a croc from the wild, and had the critter in a net, was pulling it in and the freaking thing jumped into the boat with him and the dog.  When he finally managed to get the croc back to his camp and get the jaws secure, the creature smashed its way through one of the boxes used to transport crocs.  IIRC, this croc is still at the Australia Zoo and still hated Steve Irwin with a passion even after all the years in captivity.

Steve was a professional, even with all the showmanship he practiced.  Treadwell was just a flower-flinging tree-hugger.

Real bummer for his wife and children, but the ones I REALLY feel sorry for are all the creatures in the afterlife that will now be subject to Steve Irwin's special brand of "attention".

[BigG]

Like HankB, the first time I saw Irwin I got the impression he was a Darwin award candidate. I enjoyed his show but I didn't think he was all that bright in his dealing with dangerous animals.