There's a lesson here...and a tragedy

I've been reading about Timothy Treadwell this week. I'm not sure why. Clearly it's a horrible story. There are not many things I look at and say "How tragic that could have been preventable". But this is one of those cases. It was wholly preventable making it wholly tragic. For Timothy Treadwell? No. I think he had a deathwish lurking in him and he desperately wanted it to end with a bear. But for his girlfriend, Amie, it really was the most preventable and horrifying and painful way to go. Knowing death was coming for you and not being able to figure out how to get away because you were paniced. She'd just watched the man who had told her that bears were gentle and docile be dragged into the underbrush by the head by one.

For those who need a quick synopsis, Tim and Amie were eaten by bears.

Timothy Treadwell was essentially an out of work cocktail waiter from Malibu with acting ambitions and a drug problem. And yes, I realize that's oversimplifing. At any rate, he apparently at some point with the help of a Vietnam Vet dried up and decided to devote his life to bears. No, I'm not kidding. He spent the next 13 summers on the Alaskan Coast in a massive animal preserve. He started out studying and photographing them but as time went on he became...nuts. He dubbed himself The Bear Whisperer. He would walk up to them within touching distance and try and pet them or KISS THEM. He called them names like BooBoo. He stroked bear scat and talked about how amazing it was that at some point it was inside a bear.

He eventually became obsessed with the idea that he was protecting the bears (yes, inside the wilderness preserve) and that they loved him (yes, wild bears) and that they would not harm him (again, wild bears). So much so that he eventually, as his behavior became more erratic, began throwing common sense and precautions to the wind. While no firearms were permitted in that part of the park, you could take pepper spray or a portable electric fence. He did neither claiming that the bears would be..offended in some way in his lack of trust. Listen, I have cats. My cats like me. They like to hang around, get scratched, eat, sit in my lap. But ultimately, they're cats. I love them, they have personalities. But they're cats, they're animals. If I were to disappear tomorrow and someone else showed up to do the feeding, holding, scratching thing? I'm not sure they would spare a moment's thought for me.

So, okay this is the mindset we're dealing with. His girlfriend Amie joined him for a few weeks the last three summers but she had quit her job to move to Malibu and be near him so she went for the entire summer. In Tim's own journal he laughingly says that she calls him a madman and that she is going to leave him. She wasn't as comfortable with bears. As he took no precautions against them, she did not either. She didn't know anything about bear attacks or what it means when one attacks day versus night or older bears and their food gathering or what happens right before the bears enter hibernation and turn into nothing but eating machines.

In all the years that the wilderness preserve had been there there were no reports of maulings or deaths by bears. There is all the reason to suspect that as little an ounce of prevention would have prevented these two deaths. What makes this particular attack so very...commercial is that six minutes of it were recorded on audio. For some unknown reason someone (it is presumed Amie) turned on the vid cam but forgot to take the lens off. Few people have heard the tape. The investigators, his business partner at Grizzly People, an organization he co-founded. It ran out after six minutes so the end id not recorded. The truth is that we can only guess. It's like that movie The Perfect Storm. No one really knows what happened but we can take a guess and probably not be too far off course. There is a fake recording floating around the internet but don't be fooled.

I'll agree with the arguments that he becamse the catalyst for his own death when he himself desensitized the bears to his presence (incidentally, these were NOT Grizzly, they were just brown bears), ignored park rules and common sense and on more then one occasion there is video footage of him feeding wild animals by hand. Again, you want to pave your own road to destruction with beef jerky handouts, that's your business but don't suck an innocent in with you.

I haven't seen the movie nor have I read the book. I'm not all that interested in Timothy Treadwell's one man course of self-destruction and obsession. I'm just...sad that a woman (and yes she was old enough to know better and yes she was very intelligent) died because someone told her what to think and she just did. There's a very important lesson about faith in here and how it can be turned into an ugly thing. But I'm not the person to write that story.

As usual I try not to be one of those who just tosses out an opinion without fact checking. I want all of you to do the same so I'm giving you some links. One is Timothy Treadwell's photography which is lovely. There's an RD article, one from a guy who knew him on the Penninsula, one from a tour guide, one from Grizzly People. See if you can find a lesson in blind faith in there somewhere and articulate it better than I. I hope so.

Timothy Treadwell's Last Letter

Grizzly People

Readers Digest Article

Timothy's Story from the perspective of another wildlife guide

Tim's Photos

A very detailed and researched article on the whole thing

Incidentally, I'm not recapping Grizzly Man so do not even ask.