Start watching the David Attenborough-narrated Our Planet today.
That being said, you should know that incredible footage of elaborate bird mating techniques, and wonderful drone shots of wolves hunting in the tundra, is also mixed with some pretty gut-wrenching scenes.
I’m not talking about your routine ‘polar bear eats baby seal’ stuff (that’s in there, too), but rather a particular scene that has captivated the attention of everyone who’s watched it.
We’re talking about the now-infamous Arctic walrus scene, which shows how the species is struggling as sea ice melts.
Here’s a primer from Quartz:
Some walruses, looking to move away from the large crowds to find some space to rest, scale a steep cliff overlooking the beach. The Our Planet crew were confused when these gargantuan creatures started slowly climbing the escarpment.
After resting on the 80-meter (262-foot) cliff, the walruses sense their friends below have now moved. Hungry and desperate to return to the water with them, the walruses begin to move off the cliff. They don’t understand that the fall will severely injure or kill them.
Netflix filmed hundreds of walruses falling off the cliff to their deaths. “It’s really hard to watch and witness this. It’s just so heartbreaking,” one of the filmmakers says.
First up, here’s just one clip of a walrus plunging:
There are many, many more walruses filmed plunging to injury and death.
Naturally, people are freaking out. Just look at the coverage related to this one scene via a Google News search:
You don’t get into filming a docu-series like this unless you love animals, or at least have a passing interest in them, so filming it must have been hellish.
Just remember that for each second of footage aired, there are hundreds that don’t make the cut.
In a behind the scenes clip, those present talk us through what it was like to be there firsthand:
Very, very hard to watch.
It’s one thing to see predators take down prey, as nature intended, but it’s quite another to see animals maimed and injured as a result of our glaring inaction on climate change.
Not that everyone is in agreement that we are to blame:
Some scientists who study walruses say climate change isn’t necessarily to blame for this upsetting behavior, as instances of the animals falling to their deaths have been documented back when there was still plenty of sea ice for them to rest on.
But others say that these haul-outs used to be more rare and less dangerous. Anatoly Kochnev, a Russian naturalist who worked with the Our Planet crew, told the Atlantic that when he began studying these haul-outs three decades ago, they only included males. Now they include females and calves as well. The sheer size of the haul-outs could be forcing walruses to seek refuge in riskier areas. The World Wildlife Fund says that deadly scenes like the one in Netflix’s series are becoming more common as walruses continue to lose more of their natural habitats.
So yeah, this is kinda on us.
Perhaps that’s ultimately what makes it so damn hard to watch.
[source:quartz]
