With a cub that small and vulnerable
Sure enough. Several of you mentioned a drone in the Shermer’s ursine childrearing advice post, which was news to me, but y’all were right. Ed Yong at the Atlantic:
The video was uploaded to the ViralHog YouTube channel on Friday, and after being shared on Twitter, it rapidly went viral. At the time of this writing, it has been watched 17 million times. The cub’s exploits were equal parts gif, nature documentary, and motivational poster. It had all the elements of an incredible story: the most adorable of protagonists, rising and falling action (literally), and a happy ending. It was a tale of tenacity in the face of adversity, triumph against the odds.
And a morality tale on the benefits of a sink or swim approach to childrearing as opposed to the horrors of not letting toddlers fall down steep mountainsides.
But when biologists started watching the video, they saw a very different story.
The video, they say, was clearly captured by a drone. And in it, they saw the work of an irresponsible drone operator who, in trying to film the bears, drove them into a dangerous situation that almost cost the cub its life. “I found it really hard to watch,” says Sophie Gilbert, an ecologist at the University of Idaho who studies, among other things, how drones affect wildlife. “It showed a pretty stark lack of understanding from the drone operator of the effects that his actions were having on the bears.” (It wasn’t just scientists, either; several drone pilots were also dismayed by the footage.)
The only information accompanying the video says that it was captured on June 19, 2018, in the Magadan region of Russia. No one knows who shot it, which drone was used, or how close it flew. But “it doesn’t matter how far away it was, because I can tell from the bears’ behavior that it was too close,” says Clayton Lamb of the University of Alberta, who studies grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies and uses drones to map the area where they live.
The setting of the video is already suspicious, Lamb says. With a cub that small and vulnerable, it’s very unlikely that a mother bear would opt to traverse such a steep and slippery slope. “There’s no reason a female would normally accept that risk, unless they were forced into it,” Lamb says. Throughout the video, he notes, the mother is constantly looking up at the drone and clearly bothered by its presence. At some point, the footage zooms in, probably because the drone itself was swooping closer. That, Lamb says, explains why the mother unexpectedly swats at the cub, causing it to fall. She probably read the drone’s approach as a kind of attack and was trying to push her cub away.
But it’s ok, the drone pilot was doing the bears a favor, giving the cub a chance to toughen up and not look for handouts.
I hate drones with a passion. Burglars are flying them over homes to see what people are keeping behind their houses, in sheds and back gardens. They are being used voyeuristically, as in the above example, and endangering wildlife. They are scaring livestock. And they are frequently being flown far too close to larger aircraft, endangering human life. I’d love it if they were banned tomorrow.
Yes to all that. It spooks me seeing people casually using them around here as if they were a toy. They should be banned for civilians, with exceptions for researchers and filmmakers and the like.
I mentioned Jordan Peterson in your original post, in which you properly destroyed Michael Shermer’s interpretation. I took the time to start reading, then change to skimming, the SKEPTIC article that Shermer recommended as “IMO the best article yet written on [Jordan Peterson] and the movement he’s generated.” The final comment on the article summed it up best: “I mostly do not understand what the hell you are writing about.”
If anyone cares, the article is here.
Heh. I see why you switched to skimming.
Ugh, I give up. Way too many words for the substance. Vanity writing. “Look at me, I can generate many words.”
And yes to the first comment; I had the same thought: oh yes there was plenty of sharp criticism of “Iron John” and the Promise Keepers.
Somebody should have been skeptical enough to say no thanks to this piece.
Thank you for expressing, in no more words than necessary, what junk that article is.
It’s interesting that the author of the first comment, Robert Sheaffer, finds great similarity between Bly and the “men’s movement” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Promise Keepers. I admit I had never heard of Sheaffer before, and so went inquiring. I found the following quote from him on his Wikipedia page (it apparently comes from his website): “Various feminists proclaim that women are ‘under siege’, that a monstrous social bias against them, if not a virtual war, is going on, that women have little respect or power…it is much more realistic to suggest that women have cleverly seized the upper hand by pretending to be helplessly trapped below! Looking at the full picture, and not the tiny, distorted one that feminists and those they have duped present, we see a very different picture: The American woman emerges as perhaps the most privileged large group in history…supported by the work, discipline, and self-effacing, life-destroying exertions of a group they have bamboozled – their men – into believing their cries of ‘victimization’.” This would, I think, go hand in glove with the Peterson cult of personality.