Subtle pushing of death?

Lolo, whose hearing makes it hard to watch TV (he uses earphones) likes to watch nature shows to relax before going to sleep.

so I found a lot of nature specials now on Youtube, and downloaded some from the BBC.

Yet on watching one about the south Pacific, it was beautiful, but they were showing the "goonie birds" learning to fly. Alas, some of them crashlanded, only to be eaten by awaiting sharks.

so far so good. Usually one expects the nature show to show the nest, the care of the egg and then chick, and then the first attempts to fly. But in this show, these parts were quite short, but we saw, over and over again, the poor chicks being eaten by sharks in graphic footage. I counted five at which point I turned it off, (lolo having fallen asleep).

I then checked another part of the film, and a similar "over and over" again footage was seen, of sharks eating penguins or seals.

Why the stress on death?

Nature shows often have a background commentary about "global warming" (leaving out the part about the glaciers melting 20 thousand years ago, of course, or about the various "Medieval warming" or "little ice age" parts of the cycle). They also tend to lament "loss of habitat", meaning that poor people are moving their farms into these areas.

To me this is personal, since I worked in Africa. You know why these animal herds wander around? It's the tse tse fly. If you live there, you will die of sleeping sickness, so folks don't tend to settle there. If you rid these animal areas of the tse tse flies, you could farm there and feed the world, especially if you introduced modern hybrid seeds.

After all, America feeds the world with areas that once were populated with millions of Buffalo/bison.
Yet even here, as the Hopewell people and the Mississippian culture other modern archeology are digging up the past, there is a question if the prairie and buffalo were the result of human depopulation, starting when the climate changed before Columbus, and then accelerating after the various epidemics traveled north with the trade routes from the south) not "natural".

It was thanks to the Rinderpest, that lowered the wild animal population ,that allowed much of South Africa and parts of Zimbabwe to be tsetse fly free, and have such productive farm land. And the (white) farmers tended to shoot all those wild animals, to keep the population down so the fly couldn't come back, along with a fenced area to prevent migration south, which I wonder if it is still there.

But better starving Africans and ignore the wars of Central Africa, and continue to promote "tourism" and show all those shows lamenting the passing of the primitive lifestyle in which everyone was happy, including the women who did a lot of the work and faced a painful and dangerous childbirth every couple of years.

(when I watch these type shows, I remember even in Tolkien, that it was the Entwives who made gardens, but their men ents loved the wild woods...guess Edith didn't quite agree with him about no car and no modern appliences)




One rarely sees modern Africa in these films. People are not as important as animals, except for a few shows that lament that globalization is destroying these "primitive" tribes. Hell0! a lot of these tribes are the losers. Why glamourize poverty, and not show their fellow tribes men who became Muslim and left for the cities 400 years ago? These are, after all, Iron age tribes. (Yes, there are still "bushmen", but it should be noted that they are being resetttled on farms in Botswana, and even N!Xau of "the gods must be crazy" did a couple of hilarious Chinese movies to build a decent house for his family before dying of TB.

When no longer offered film roles, he returned to his newly built brick house in Tsumkwe, and the familiarity of life as a herdsman, tending his cattle and raising pumpkins, corn and beans. He kept no more than 20 cattle at a time