As a child I would, on occasion, watch a fair amount television. Some of the time it would be cartoons, such as Arthur or Clifford the Big Red Dog. Certain times there would be other interesting shows on the television, but what I enjoyed watching the most were nature documentaries. I loved being able to see animals who lived in such a different place of the world find food, eat it, reproduce, care for their young, battle competitors, migrate, find water, escape the literal jaws of death, and many many more things. These documentaries made me want to travel the world, see these creatures face to face, and face danger for myself. Some of the most notable places that I desperately wanted to go to included the African plains, the vast jungles of the Amazon, and the sheer awesomeness of the Alaskan wilderness.
The desire to visit these places has not left me, I still want to go all over the world, even so many years after my initial contact with the wonders of nature documentary. While I do not have any interest in making these films, and while the initial awestruckness that I experienced when I first viewed the wild is gone, I still enjoy on occasion a good nature film.
However many people, including myself, have been deceived. All of the nature films that I watched gave the appearance that they were filmed in the wildernesses of the world with wild animals acting in a wild manner undisturbed by humans (with rare exceptions). This is not the case. An Article in the Huffington Post described some of the shortcuts filmmakers take in order to meet time, and budget requirements. Often animals are filmed while they are in captivity, while being portrayed as though they are in the wild. There are other cases in which prey animals are wounded or disabled in order to ensure that the powerful predator that they are filming gets a kill. In other more extreme cases animals are even more poorly treated.
Beyond the treatment of the animals in these films is the treatment of the audience. The viewers are deceived, told that one thing is happening while another is. This will make me much more cautious as I watch nature films and I will be much less likely to be drawn in completely to any one show or episode. I will also look for things such as were described in the article, seeing if I can be smarter than many of the producers think that the average viewer will be. Not all nature documentaries are like this, many of them use good filming techniques and are very ethically treat the animals, some of them are listed in the article, but all regardless of how they are made expose us to nature.
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