Risky Behavior and UW Photography

[Storm]

<<He did not advance our knowlegde of his subjects>>

You don't know what you're talking about.

First, Steve was working with animals and traipsing around the outback long before he ever was put on TV. Steve didn't care a lick about promoting himself. His entire interest was in protecting wildlife so it will be here in the future. His way of doing that was by pointing out the amazing things about animals so that people in the city will take an interest and make the effort to protect the animals. It was the media machine that stuffs Pirates of the Carribean and Disneyland and SUVs down your throat that picked him up and pumped it to the world, for their purposes.

And Steve worked on all kinds of scientific studies of animals and their habitats. He'd just completed work in Northern Australia.

Whether you talked to him face to face or he was on camera, he WAS ALWAYS that enthusiastic. Not to buy his T-shirt but to go out and think about the fact that any creature you see is more than a expendable object with no thoughts or feelings.

And I watched him since the beginning and he didn't molest creatures. Did he drag crocs out by the tail to capture them? Yes. But you have to. What did he do with them? Moved them to some safer location. Any animal I ever saw him work with he treated with respect and awe and put it back where it was.

Steve wasn't about TV or comparisons to how we think people ought to act. He was interested in the animals. He just got a chance to use TV to help support himself and spread his interest.

I mean, who the hell would turn down a state funeral? Who would wear khakis always?

I'm sure I'm not changing any made up minds but forget about all these pretensions when you're considering Steve.

Please educate me then. Please provide references to where I can find the studies he authored, research papers he wrote, or research projects he headed up. Please do not send me links to project he funded, ( I have already agreed that, as a philanthropist he was one of the premier with regards to wildlife conservation issues) but the point I was making was that HE himself, was not engaged in scientific study and his shows were more entertainment than scientific in nature.

If you please as well, please list his fellowships, etc on any Australian Zoological society. I have bee searching for h=the last few days and cannot find any.


BTW, apparently as reported in Time’s Online publication:

“Cropp says Irwin had accidently (sp) boxed the animal in, causing it to attack. "It stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest," says Cropp. "It's a defensive thing. It's like being stabbed with a dirty dagger." Says Cropp: "It's a one-in-a-million thing. I have swum with many rays, and I have only had one do that to me."