Frozen Planet too hard to watch

[BooseysMom]

Apologies if there is another thread on this. I posted on a thread under film discussions but no traffic.

i watched the 2nd Frozen Planet and in places it was too hard to watch as the first was. The running theme that we are all to blame for the melting of the ice and climate change as a furry white seal pup gets swept away from its mother on a block of ice. The narrative that very few pups survive as they're not strong enough to swim in the fierce ocean. The look of terror in its huge eyes. Awful. The end showed the boat and divers swimming with the pup and made me wonder if we are to blame, why can't we do something to help the poor thing instead of just watching it drift away

they can’t intervene. They are trying to show us nature.

A relative is a camera person on the show. It takes months and months to get the footage.

I agree OP. I can't watch it. Not a criticism of the show, i just can't bear the sadness of it all.

Yes, stopped watching this kind of programme a long time ago as too upsetting.

Dh cant watch anymore since he finds them too upsetting and depressing

I suppose the point is that you should feel upset watching it - the stark reality of what we are inflicting on the planet and nature is horrific. I think the only way to tolerate that feeling is to think of ways that you or your family can make changes to help the planet, rather than turning it off and trying to forget about it.

Thanks everyone. Glad I'm not the only one who feels like this!

they can’t intervene. They are trying to show us nature.

A relative is a camera person on the show. It takes months and months to get the footage

I know they say we shouldn't intervene but as the climate warms and we are the cause, I think we should intervene more. Yes it's nature but climate change is man-made.

What do you want them to do, keep every pup on the boat until they're strong enough to survive, and hope they haven't fucked up their survival skills? It's very sad, and humanity as a whole has a responsibility to act, but there's nothing the camera crew can do in the moment.

But this is what happens. Back when they tried to adopt increasingly grim advertising campaigns to get people to wear seatbelts/ reduce drink driving/ quit smoking - they found that people switched off and simply ignored it.

If the aim is to get people to switch on and adopt new habits then that won't be achieved with unremitting admonishment, pessimism and a narrative of hopelessness. Although clearly this lands with a satisfactory tone for those who are already engaged in ecological issues and looking to scratch a moral itch.

I used to love watching wildlife programs but I just can't watch them now. I feel so helpless. I give to as many animal charities as I can but making a change is so beyond me. I have an intense empathy for animals.

I know I'm being ridiculous as that's very true, we can't just capture all the pups and keep them until they're strong enough to survive.
As a pp said earlier we all need to do what we can in our lives to reduce carbon emissions. It's the only way to help them I guess.

They can and do intervene regularly when something is suffering/dying needlessly (as in it’s not being eaten by anything). They don’t show that on camera though as people will think of it more as a rescue program and expect them to do it for every animal. The whole point is to show the trials and tribulations they go through in the natural world. I know someone who was part of a crew filming wild flamingos. A bunch of the babies walked through this thick, muddy water before falling asleep. While they were asleep the mud dried into heavy lumps around their ankles, they couldn’t walk and the crew filmed the parents eventually walking away while the babies were collapsed in the mud. On the program it made out like the babies died. In reality the cameras got turned off, the dried mud was cut off with some pliers and the babies were carried and reunited with their parents :)

Blimey that's amazing about the baby flamingos!! What superstars the camera men were!

I've never been able to watch nature documentaries.. they are far too harrowing . I don't eat meat or dairy though because I know animals die in fear daily ..

It's just awful 😢

I never watch these programs for this reason. Was shown one when having an MRI scan and it was ok y until they showed a flamingo chick that had salt encrusted round it's legs. And it would die. Told them not yo show that video again! I got a different one today!

@buttons123456
@Toddlerteaplease
Yes I agree. It makes me wonder whether the animals and birds are actually better off in zoos. It's a sad world that this is now the case.

It is sad but nature is cruel. Even man made nature.

I remember the episode where loads of baby turtles hatched and were attracted to the bright city lights instead of the moon and ended up wandering into the city and therefore in danger of being squished by cars.

In reality, the film crew filmed some of it and then ran around with buckets and collected as many as they could to return to the sea.

Another one I remember I think was penguins? They had fallen down a cliff side and the snow was too deep for them to walk up.

The film crew actually dug a passageway back up to the cliff face to help them.

They do intervene more than they should but I don’t think anyone is going to complain

I absolutely agree. I used to love nature programmes, but I can’t watch them now. It all seems so hopeless, when most of us are doing what we can to reduce our waste, energy consumption and carbon footprint. Except most governments. All the nature programmes, and a few of the travelogues like Simon Reeve seem to have an ecological drum to bang, and it’s constant. More positive programming showing the wonders of our planet would be far more helpful. Negativity feeds hopelessness, not change.

IIRC they were able to intervene with the baby turtles as it was humans fault they were heading for the city lights.

Showing the wonders of the planet makes so many of us want to see them for ourselves, and then we become part of the problem.

I had a dream for years that one day I would visit Antarctica. Now though I think perhaps I should leave it the hell alone, otherwise it too will become full of cruise ships disgorging hordes of tourists to trample all over the very stark isolation that makes it so beautiful.

it does feel sad. We have a beautiful planet, but there are so many of us now, and so many who have the means to travel to the parts that were previously remote and untouched. I don’t know how as a planet we can turn away from the course we are on - we only understand growth, bigger economies, bigger GDP, more consumption. There is no other beautiful land waiting just over the horizon for us to sail to. This is all we have.

I used to love Attenborough docs, I'd be so excited when they were shown, but I stopped watching any wildlife shows for a few years now. I have a long work week, I am up all night with young DC, when I get 20 mins to sit and watch something I don't want to be lectured on something I have very little control over.

Yes. Because they had put up bright lights as is city life.

I do think they have changed it to orange lights now but still

Too depressing.

The problem is way bigger that rescuing one seal pup. It's climate change. What we needed was 20 years was for government to put in place plans for alternative energy, massive investment in public transport, legislation on new builds having passive house insulation, banning products which support unsustainable deforestation, bigger restrictions on pollution and emissions. Most people like yourself feel uncomfortable watching this on TV but rather than address the real issue you will fixate on one seal pup and switch it off.

The trouble, when humans start intervening, is that we often don't understand the systems we are tinkering with. Obv climate change is responsible for messing with the systems in a massive scale, and is a huge problem that desperately needs proper action on a scale much larger than is currently being taken.

But - some cute little seal pups will always have not survived, and they will form part of the food chain that their predators (less cute but still important) rely on for their own survival. If we 'saved' all of the seal pups we would be removing a food source that their predators need at pup season and the knock on effects - both up and down the food chain, would spiral. Nature is a fine balance. Less seal predators surviving, more seals surviving (who are predators themselves), the predators of the seal predators, their other prey, the seals prey would all be affected and so on and so on.

We have caused climate change - but just monkeying around with some specific animals is unlikely to be a satisfactory solution. We need to tackle climate change as a whole and any specific species based action needs to be incredibly carefully considered.

I do feel it's a bit hypocritical BBC wildlife teams and Attenborough lecturing people who fly occasional short distances on climate change when they travel round the world with often a large team and encourage people to fly to remote areas to see these places. Attenboroughs carbon footprint is bigger than mine, I bet his house is bigger too and more costly to heat.