Eaten Alive

Bye bye….

Yesterday I spent some time watching Eaten Alive on Animal Planet.

There was a story of a man who had an African bot fly growing in his stomach and had to have it surgically removed.

Well, you don’t see that kind of thing every day.

Eaten Alive was followed by Monsters Inside Me, a weekly show apparently devoted to parasites.

At this point, I flipped over to BBC America where there was a report that due to human pressure, there may soon be no more giraffes, elephants, lions or a cape buffalo in the Massai Mara game park in Kenya.  The BBC noted that we are in fact witnessing a massive extinction process.

Now, maybe Animal Planet is getting ahead of the curve in its programming.  Maybe they are simply gearing up for a planet in which the only wildlife left are going to be parasites and bot flys.  If so, good for them.

On the other hand, I tend to think that their programming is rather designed for maximizing their audiences with shock value or just home-spun cute dogs, as opposed to trying to communicate anything of any real value, at a time when maybe they should.

Yesterday, The New York Times ran a piece by Nicholas Kristoff, in which he pointed out that our brains are hard-wired to deal with immediate threats, like pythons or bot flys, I suppose, but don’t do very well with long-term theats like global warming (or the mass extinction of most large animals on the planet).

So I can’t really blame the folks at Animal Planet.

They know their audiences.

Short attentions spans. Immediate issues.

But I think it’s kind of a tragedy.

While the natural world is daily being ravaged and driven to the edge of extinction, or beyond for that matter, we have a cable channel with enormous resources devoted, apparently, to Animal Planet.

Yet when we look at their programming, it is filled with the banal and the trivial:

Beverly Hills Groomer – about a dog groomer in Beverly Hills. ‘Will he make it?’
Planet’s Funniest Animals – ‘hilarious hijinks’

Pet Stars – ‘does your pet have stars in their eyes?

Housecat Housecall

Groomer Has It

You get the idea.

Again, not to condemn Animal Planet.

They are in search of ratings and this apparently is what their audience wants to see.

Rather, I would condemn us.

100 years from now, when there are no longer any Elephants, Lions, Tigers or Giraffes left on the planet and our world is populated solely by Bot Flys, Schistosomes and very well groomed dogs, we may, from time to time ask our selves what happened.

Fortunately, the archives of Animal Planet will offer a ready response.