Let me begin by saying I absolutely love watching both Survivorman AND Man vs Wild, with the edge going to Man vs Wild because the show’s host’s name is Bear Grylls.
Bear Grylls? Awesome name, Awesome english or welsh accent, who doesn’t like a show host with those attributes? There is only one exception to a TV host with a similar accent.
His name is Simon from the hit show, American Idol. What a total douchebag! He has been proven wrong time and time again and what makes it worse-he continues to be the complete snotbag he’s always been.
Back to Bear and Man vs Wild.
If you don’t know the premise of the show, Man vs Wild is supposedly a semi-realistic TV show based on Bear being sent to insane and mostly death-assured, remote places on planet earth.
During these adventures, Bear and usually a single camera-man use natural resources to replicate and show numerous ways that a person, stranded in a variety of wildernesses, could survive and even perhaps reach civilization and therefore be rescued.
During these replications, Bear often has to forage and/or hunt a variety of animals, insects and vegetation, sometimes having to choose whether or not to eat said object(s).
Now I do not have any objection in the least to who or what he chooses to eat. What really got on my nerves happened during Episode 2, Season 9, the Dominican Republic.
In this show, Bear and his camera-man came across a wild fowl, some stinking remnant brought to the Dominican Republic by thoughtless, disease-ridden European explorers.
Bear finds some random heavy stick out of the foliage and proceeds to sneak up on the unsuspecting creature, finally managing to ‘stun’ or ‘crush’ it after multiple attempts.
He proceeds to hand clean the bird, ripping feathers, entrails and what not. His field dressing is just fine and in no way strays from the expected actions of what someone in his situation SHOULD do.
He then does the unthinkable, pulls his field knife out and tears out the breast of the bird, tossing the rest of the carcass to the ground.
I guess some hungry animal would have a very excellent meal.
Are you kidding me?! Why, in a survival situation, would you tear out and cook/eat ONLY the breast, the leanest and least-nutritious portion of the carcass?
The legs, the organ-meat, the brain, any of the fatty portions and even the belly/ribcage meat would have made a much more fundamentally correct meal to eat given the horrid and nearly-impossible survival situation Bear is supposed to be in.
It doesn’t stop at that.
In other episodes he takes a bite of organ-meat, particular a sheep’s heart in Ireland, and then takes only the most delicious part of the corpse to cook later over his -survival- camp-fire, the tenderloin.
I know it’s probably just to make good television, but in my opinion, from the view of someone who has watched and enjoyed just about every show ever made on survival or people attempting to portray the correct way to survive in hostile situations, WHY oh why wouldn’t you just eat the whole bird or eat the whole sheep’s heart.
All I know is this.
If I were in a horrible situation in which I had almost no chance to live, I would have eaten just about every bit of that damn bird/sheep.
At least the bits that wouldn’t make me sick and/or were rotten.
-Kyarnboy, wong_83@hotmail.com
The Ruining of America 