My nine-year-old daughter absolutely loved crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, who died this week while swimming with stingrays in Australia. But she wasn't surprised he got killed. Like me, she was only surprised at the way it happened, and that it hadn't happened sooner.
Irwin was stung to death by a stingray, which normally are pretty docile creatures. I've been scuba diving and encountered a stingray or two, but when I did I mustered every ounce of physical courage I possessed (which isn't much), hung absolutely still in the water and let the stingray swim over me. It passed up my face, over the top of my head and down my back, as if it were checking my pockets for crumbs (which it was, in a way) and then it swam away. It was an interesting moment--but would I ever seek out a stingray and horse around with it? Hell, no. Those things have stingers. That's why they call them stingrays.
Irwin, however, was famous for, and made millions of dollars out of, getting up close and personal with wild animals. He said, and I believe him, that it was because he loved them and wanted the world to appreciate them in their natural glory. Maybe so, but the reasoning still seemed a little faulty to me. I love my husband, too, but if I got in his face all the time I do believe he would get a little testy. It always seemed very odd to me that a man who said he loved animals couldn't give them the basic respect of letting them have their own space. Which, in the case of wild animals, is a healthy distance.
I am sorry for his wife and children; no family should lose its dad so young. But Irwin's death did not surprise my daughter--and maybe it will serve as a cautionary tale for our Sea-World, Crocodile-Hunter, circus-going society that nature is not a Disney production, animals are not put on this planet for our entertainment and that wild things should be observed respectfully, from a distance, and left the fuck alone.