Netflix Series Accused of Making Fake Claims About Walrus Deaths
“The walruses shown in this Netflix film were almost certainly driven over the cliff by polar bears during a well-publicised incident in 2017.”
There are two types of science practiced today: Real science and politicized science.
Netflix has come under fire for allegedly trying to palm off fake information about walrus deaths as serious proof of climate change.
Netflix’s acclaimed Our Planet series has come under fire for “tragedy porn” over images of walruses falling to their deaths from cliff tops, allegedly because of climate change.
The Our Planet footage, narrated by David Attenborough, showed dozens of the animals climbing up 80 metre high outcrops in northeast Russia because of a lack of sea ice.
They were shown plunging onto the rocks below, with hundreds of dead animals piled on the shoreline. A voice-over by Attenborough claimed their poor eyesight made it hard for them to return safely to the ocean.
However, it turns out a more reasonable explanation exists when it comes to these walrus deaths, according to Dr. Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist specializing in evolution and the ecology of Holocene mammals (including polar bears and walrus):
Dr Susan Crockford, a zoologist, told The Telegraph that Netflix’s narrative over the Our Planet scene is “contrived nonsense” and that “This powerful story is fiction and emotional manipulation at its worst”.
“The walruses shown in this Netflix film were almost certainly driven over the cliff by polar bears during a well-publicised incident in 2017.”
“Even if the footage shown by Attenborough was not the 2017 incident in Ryrkaypiy, we know that walruses reach the top of cliffs in some locations and might fall if startled by polar bears, people or aircraft overhead, not because they are confused by shrinking sea ice cover.”
At the time of this report, Netflix has not identified the site, or sites, that were included for the walrus herd in their film or specified exactly when the cliff incident occurred.
Anthony Watts, weather technology expert and author of the “Watts Up With That” climate website, has taken a look at the footage and also suspects the footage captured was the 2017 Siberian incident.
I’ve been able to show that Crockford’s supposition about the geographical origin of the footage is correct: analysis of the rock shapes in the film and in a photo taken by the producer/director both match archive photos of Ryrkaypiy. The photo was taken on 19 September 2017, during the events described by the Siberian Times.
But whereas the Siberian Times and Gizmodo website, which also reported on the 2017 incident, were both quite clear that the walruses were driven over the cliffs by polar bears, Netflix makes no mention of their presence. Similarly, there is no mention of the fact that walrus haulouts are entirely normal. Instead, Attenborough tells his viewers that climate change is forcing the walruses on shore, where their poor eyesight leads them to plunge over the cliffs.
This is all very troubling as it raises the possibility that Netflix and the WWF are, innocently or otherwise, party to a deception of the public.
Watts also notes that Neflix isn’t the first company trying to peddle wildlife tragedy porn.
In 1958 Walt Disney produced “White Wilderness,” part of the studio’s “True Life Adventure” series. “White Wilderness” featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide.
According to a 1983 investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer Brian Vallee, the lemming scenes were faked. The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers. The epic “lemming migration” was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on snow covered lazy-Susan style turntable.
I will post this as a hypothesis: Any entity offering wildlife tragedy porn as proof of their assertions is offering nothing but politicized science and should be ignored.
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Noticed the Polar Bear pic. A reading from The Book of Obvious. If you are interested in Polar Bears here’s a good site.
https://polarbearscience.com/
I’m a hunter. For some strange reason certain people thing that means I hate the animals I hunt. Which is ridiculous. I couldn’t successfully hunt these animals if I didn’t have an affinity for them. I hunt ducks. I’ve been a member of Ducks Unlimited since I was eleven. I was, until recently, a member of a duck club on Suisun bay in Kali. I mantain the habitat. Sure, I take a few ducks now and again. But I protect the rest from urban encroachment.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-deer-of-north-america_leonard-lee-rue-iii/632300/?utm_term=1101002864412&mkwid=7MdyfP12%7cdc&pcrid=11558858575&utm_campaign=Bing+Shopping+%7c+Science+&+Math&utm_medium=cpc&msclkid=7cdd02ab725e11dec4dd5e1f89515c3a&utm_source=bing#isbn=1558215778&idiq=8688048&mkwid=7MdyfP12%7Cdc&pcrid=11558858575
Who else buys books like this except hunters? I like deer. I like bears. like them so much I know better than to trust them. The Polar Bear is outside of an Orca the supreme predator in the Arctic. But the most common bear in North America is the Black Bear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=WTcbD2wRu1c
“Bear attacks and kills hiker: Darsh Patel photographed his killer moments before death”
Black Bears are different from Griz. A griz will attack you if you invade their space. Or come close to their cubs. You can play dead and survive, if the whacks you get don’t kill you. But when a Black Bear attacks you the bear seriously wants to eat you because the berry harvest wasn’t sufficient.
A Polar Bear always wants to eat you. Unlike Darsh Patel I’m not whipping out a phone to take a selfie when a bear comes at me. I’m also not whipping out a pistol. My Alaska friends laugh at the thought a handgun can protect you from a bear and advise people who think otherwise to grind down the front sight so it doesn’t hurt so bad when the bear shoves it up your (blank). I’m aiming my rifle. Which I am never without when I’m in bear, cougar, or alligator country. And I’m turning that bear into a rug.
Hey Arminius, ever read John Wooters Hunting Trophy Deer?
L.L. Rue III was really good but Wooters was ahead of the hunting fraternity.
One of the great deer books of all time was my opinion back in 1977 when I stumbled across it in my hometown library. Still one of the best for rookie hunters.
No, sir. But thanks for recommending the book to me. Found it on Amazon. It’s on order. I have never been opposed to taking a wall hanger. You should see my wall. I have no wall space left. No wonder I can’t find a woman. My living room is like an animal mortuary.
One of my favorite trophies is a Caribou I shot east of Dillingham. The bush pilot who picked us up said, “Oh, you got a pretty one.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he was just being nice.
when we arrived back in the base camp I saw the antlers of the other Caribou and I was like, “OK, that’s what a full sized one looks like. I got a 3/4 size replica.” But actually he was right. I did get a pretty one. It’s nicely palmated sort of like a moose. And the Indian village I donated the meat to appreciated my effort, even though it went to feeding their sled dogs.
I may not eat the meat personally, but none of it goes to waste. If you hunt Alaska the state troopers will make sure of that. You pack out all the meat before you pack out the antlers, and if they have any doubts you complied with the law they’ll march you twelve hours back to your kill to make sure there’s not even a scrap of neck meat on it.
But I don’t need a law on the books to tell me all the meat is coming back. It might go to my refrigerator. It might go to a food bank. But it’s coming back with me. It’s funny the liberal wife of my best man became a fan after we killed some hogs in Mendocino county. Now when I visit she’s like, “Hey, why don’t you two go hunting?”
https://www.yelp.com/biz/save-more-meat-market-pacifica
These Chinese men turned those hogs into the best Italian sausage you ever tasted. Now when I visit she tells us we need to go hunting more.
One of the funnest parts is that when we drop the hogs off all the Hispanics from the muffler shop next door come over to see what we got. Well, that, and driving through San Francisco with the tail gate dropped down and a couple of dead hogs in the bed of the pickup.
When I go hog hunting in Kali it’s like the best of all worlds. On the one hand it’s like a mini and very friendly UN conference. On the other hand I p&&s all the right people off.
There’s a diorama at the Kodiak airport. Griz kills Blacktail deer. It looks like Godzilla stomping on Bambi. You don’t mess with bears.
Any bear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=cg25PVr0zLg
“Raw: Bear attacks tourists in Japan”
Like I said, it’s a reading from the book of obvious. When you shoot a deer or caribou in Alaska (never hunted moose) and a bear hears the sound of the shot the bear is likely to come and take it away from you. Alaska law says you can kill a bear to protect your property, but Alaska law also says that your dead deer is not your property. The bear can have it, and you can go shoot another one. This is why my Alaska deer rifle is a .338 Winchester Magnum. Because maybe the bear will show up when it’s too late for me to let the bear have it.
There is science and then there is scientism. Science is practiced by scientists interested in arriving at practical answers to their testable hypotheses(two possible outcomes: false or NOT false… it is never true). And then there is the religion of scientism which is practiced by politically-driven activists purporting to be speaking in the name of science. In scientism, anything a scientismist says cannot be questioned. No proof needed. They are high priests ordained by Gaia.
This latest deception reminds me of a far worse lie Netflix told. Two years ago Netflix released “First They Killed My Father”, a true story about a Cambodian girl who survived the Khmer Rouge. Since I thought the book was excellent I was eagerly awaiting the movie.
But the movie turned out to be Hollywood disinformation. The open sequence of the movie made it clear who the producers though was actually responsible for the genocide: Richard Nixon and the US military. The movie adaption seems to be a mixture of the original memoir and another book called “Sideshow”, written by William Shawcross. The latter tome was an effort by the Left to obscure the fact that they had openly supported the genocidal Communists.
After the movie’s opening sequence (which lasted about two minutes) the rest of the movie wandered aimlessly. The producers, having labeled Darth Nixon and his US Army stormtroopers the true villains, had nothing else to do except to extend a tentative olive branch to the Khmer Rouge as poor, innocent victims radicalized by American imperialism. It is the first movie I ever saw where 99% of the movie was postscript. I didn’t think any movie about communist genocide could be worse than “The Killing Fields”. I was wrong.
I wound up cancelling my subscription to Netflix (not that they cared). But at least I am not funding the communist propaganda anymore.
Polar bears have always killed walruses. It’s what they do. It’s how they make their living. It’s one of the reasons I hunt. So I don’t remove myself so far from nature that I don’t, among other things, misunderstand Polar Bears. What do you expect them to do? Eat penguins? Penguins, it you don’t know, live in the southern hemisphere. Polar Bears live in the Arctic. I think maybe if they could get past the Equator they would hunt Penguins although I think the Leopard Seals would give them a good fight.
But for now the Polar Bears have to make do with Walruses. You know, salad bars are few and far between when you get north of Fairbanks.
Ursus Bogus – https://polarbearscience.com/tag/ursus-bogus/
What do you in Wyoming during the summer?
If it falls on a Saturday you have a BBQ.
I sometimes wonder if I wasted my time. Sometimes. But I could only be in one place at one time. I often wish I had stayed in the US and became a teacher. Well, I was a kind of teacher. I taught the Basic Shipboard Intelligence Course at FITCPAC. The Fleet Intelligence Training Center, Pacific.
My claim to fame. Arminius. Trainer of Snoopie teams
You know what? That’s not nothing.
https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=76958
“SNOOPIE Team to the Rescue”
Nimitz said that at Midway intel was worth an extra battle group.
which meant I had a lot to live up to. I hope I did. I hope I still can.
“Nimitz said that at Midway intel was worth an extra battle group.”
Considering we sent three carriers, one a cripple, and another on the decisive day missing in action, I’d say that was understatement.
My better-half and myself watched about a half-hour of it (it looked interesting in the listings). Some gorgeous photography. But it quickly became apparent that it was a Climate Cult propaganda piece to scaremonger viewers into believing the fiction of “climate change.”. Not-so-subtle “facts and figures” of rapidly declines species’ levels and such were interspersed at key moments — and to the sentient they were facially grossly exaggerated, i.e., false. Wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this was the source of AOC’s “we’ll all be dead in 12 years” bulloney. Turned it off; won’t watch any further.
That is a correct summary of that show. Beautiful photography, spoiled by true believer OTT ism.
We watched the first episode of this steaming pile of garbage last night, expecting great family oriented entertainment. Instead it was a fire hose of climate alarmist propaganda, much of which has been debunked.
Earlier nature videos on Netflix had small hints of the climate agenda, but this one was so over the top, I had trouble not shutting it off before our daughter’s bed time.
We’re going to check out hulu and shut off Netflix. I’m getting sick of them piling on the politics.
The “Epic Yellowstone” series was pretty good.
All I need to be happy is a good bait ball and a bunch of predators. There is just something ethereal about how the water shimmers with displaced scales after all is said and done.
Polar bears (and walruses) survived at least two historical (i.e., they took place during a time when humans were keeping a written record of their history) phases of global temperature increase, the Roman Maximum the the Medieval Optimum. During both periods, average temperatures in the northern hemisphere (and some climate scientists will tell you there is evidence the effect was world-wide) were greater than what is predicted for us in our current warming* period. If sea ice and/or the Greenland ice sheet reacts badly to such conditions (as predicted now) they must have done so during those periods. Yet polar bears and walruses survived them, and other, similar periods in pre-historic times. The dire predictions of the warmists are for no other reason than keeping us alarmed about imaginary terrors.
*There’s an argument to be made that we are not in a warming period, but in a cooling period:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kUAtt2pXlc&t=1s
The evidence Heller shows of “confirmation bias” is astounding.
Goo goo ga joob!
First, the polar bears. Now, the walruses. Will no one save the eagles!? Are people so green? Here’s to post-normal, consensus-driven science. #HateLovesAbortion
I watched the first few installments of this show. The cinematography was breathtakingly beautiful. Not all the message was about climate change. But the premise of the show was to show that the earth was in peril by climate change. And the shear onesidedness and propaganda feel to it made me quit the series.
This was not the only story that I suspected was not as shown. They made dozens of claims about climate change causing this or that, that did not pass the smell test. If I had more time I would research them, but hopefully someone with knowledge will expose additional ones.