Our camera operator could easily help, but they won’t.
Helping the crab would eliminate the purpose of the camera altogether. As humans, we feel empathy for the individual. But in a natural state, there are predators and scavengers who survive if the crab dies, just as the crab preys on its food. The cycle of life will progress undisturbed whether we observe it or not, and learning what we can from the life and death of the crab is more valuable than the sum total of the individual crab’s experiences or suffering. Interference will only shift suffering from one individual to the next.
But what do we learn? There’s no scientific rigor in dramatizing a creature’s survival. The purpose of a nature documentary is to capture on film the essence of the natural world, to share it, but also to sell it for profit. The crab’s struggles become the ad dollars that fund the camera crew and studio and the scientific research into crab migration patterns. Of course, the revenue from nature documentaries rarely generates profit to justify the investment. So that can’t be the only motivation.
Could it be that anthropomorphizing the crab desensitizes the viewer to accept the suffering of the individual if it benefits the greater good? In this framework, suffering of the individual is expected, even welcome, as long as the system remains strong. Predators eat, prey are eaten, and interference is a fool’s errand.
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In one of the BBC ones they had this kind of moment with a whole flock of penguins trapped in a gully but then in the post show ‘How we filmed all this’ part they revealed that after the cameras stopped rolling they just didn’t have the heart to let them all die so they cut a set of stairs into the side of the gully so they could get out.
BASED
there’s much more purpose to nature documentaries.
no one would care about any of these animals or there plights without them. zoos and nature documentaries are the biggest drivers or interest and donations in the protecting the natural world.
not interfering with what is happening is more than just a nature documentary thing, it’s a journalism thing in general. the only reason journalists get access to the places and things they do is because they don’t interfere. interfering with the natural world is a hard thing to do right. usually the obvious answer is the wrong one when it comes to preservation and restoration. and i mean sure, there’s times when it’s obvious that your interference wouldn’t be a bad thing, but part of the point of following a code of ethics is to remove the human element. follow the code strictly and you will never cause harm.
imagine if a bbc earth filmmaker accidentally got an endangered animal in a remote area sick because he decided to remove a fish hook. that remote area would never allow anyone to film there again.
but generally, the goal of journalists is to show things as they are. to educate the world on the problem. to do that you must show the problem playing out without intervention. and if there is no problem, if it’s just an animal being hunted then you’d likely be causing harm to something else by preventing it.
a journalist believes they can do more good by showing one child dying to the entire world than by using their talents with words and cameras to somehow save a single starving child. they went there in person to do what they think will be effective in the long term. you could also go there in person to get hands on and save the animals if you want. they are no more guilty of not saving these things than you are.
Well that was a wild ride of a comment.
Your account is overdrawn
Let’s follow this adorable family of, I dunno, weasels or something. We’ll name every one of the dozen kits and give them each individual narratives, which will make it even more traumatizing when all but one of them are horribly killed and eaten on camera.
- Nature documentaries
this is an old seinfeld bit, you cheer whichever animal is the protagonist du jour and then next week, you want the current protagonist to fuck over the animal that the very last week you were cheering for.
