The draw is that he’s putting himself in pain. He could draw the same audience by claiming to test the pain scale of hitting himself with various frying pans without involving any wildlife.
Remember please, this is opinion, and was asked for.
I ain’t mad, but I wish he/they wouldn’t. I’m not even a fan of tv based invasive encounters with wildlife. Even Steve Irwin often pushed past what I consider acceptable interference for education, but I’m on the strict end of things with that.
Here’s why.
Cameras. It was extremely rare for Irwin to show us something that couldn’t have been achieved with a good camera from a reasonable distance that not only got good images, but showed more natural behaviors. I still love Irwin, and think his enthusiasm and love of animals balances things out in terms of benefits.
We’re at a point with camera technologies that direct interaction with wildlife is unnecessary. We can use any number of tools to see the glory of nature without putting our thumbs up their butt to see what happens (not that he ever did, but I love that episode of South Park lol, and it fits how I view that kind of thing).
We have zoos, we have education centers, we have captive bred examples, so we don’t need multiple people out there repeating the same thing over and over. I get the desire, I get the interest in such filming, and as long as the wildlife isn’t harmed, I don’t care enough to raise any hell. I just wish we would collectively stop. Film from a distance or use tools to get close, use old footage of invasive interactions instead of new ones.
Peterson is no worse than anyone else, and better than most. I dig his enthusiasm. It just isn’t necessary, and its value for education is lower than it should be, in order to be acceptable to me.
But, again, I ain’t mad. No hate, no call to arms, I just wish he’d stop and do other things instead.
An example of the worst kind of thing he does. It’s nothing to be mad at, but totally unnecessary. It interferes with the spider for no good reason. We learn nothing from disturbing the spider that a voiceover couldn’t provide, along with some footage of a captive bred spider being handled to show that we needn’t fear spiders (but shouldn’t mess with them in the wild). This particular video exemplifies what I object to, and why better than any others I could recall.