Wildlife Experts versus Media Showmen

I have always believed that the black bear is my totem, which may be an irony, considering that I've lived with and cared for a captive pack of gray, or timber, wolves - mortal enemies of bears - for so many years. Maybe more ironic when you figure that the true love of my life Cheanne Chellis is most definitely a wolf spirit, and even owns, under a special lifetime permit, a small pack of wolves that have been with her for 14 years. Cheanne knows wolves like no one I've ever met; she's read every book by every biologist and woodsman who has written about the species, and her bookcase is lined with reference books.

But Cheanne is a doer, not an actor. She lives to educate people who harbor sometimes enormous misconceptions and prejudices about wolves, and literally hundreds of visitors who thought they hated the species have left her seminars realizing that they were simply mistaken. Cheanne's wolves have been featured on Country Music Television (CMT), on local TV news broadcasts, in several books, and in numerous magazine articles.

Alas, Cheanne is not a drama queen, and while she has been quietly fighting the good fight that has helped to make "going green" and being ecologically responsible a social must, others have been garnering the glory for her efforts. Take the embarrasingly embellished TV docudrama about the greasy-haired, unwashed guy from Britain (where there have not been wolves in a millennium). Somehow someone permitted this carnival geek (that's not an insult, merely an observation) to keep a pack of wolves with dubious bloodlines, and he has used outlandish behavior to parlay that into a TV career. The show is only peripherally about wolves, and watchers should be warned to take nothing they see or hear on it as factual or representative of the species Canis lupus.

The same phenomenon was seen with Timothy Dexter, who changed his last name to "Treadwell" because it had a cooler sound for TV and media exposure. Real bear experts like Dr. Lynn Rogers and fellow Michigander Doug Peacock have gone virtually unrecognized, while Timmy formed a fan club devoted to himself, and was/is all over the nature channels. Authentic bear experts were not at all surprised when Tim got himself eaten by an old, sickly bear - which they immediately recognized as the killer from Dexter's videos. The tragedy was that he took a poor starstruck young girl with him.

Unfortunately, as far as stardom is concerned, genuine experts who do not make stupid mistakes, who do not get themselve or others attacked and killed, simply don't create the adventures that so many watchers and readers vote for with their dollars. Doug Peacock is too smart to ever host a show about the brown bears he knows so intimately; I'll never have a movie made about me like the late Christopher McCandless; and Cheanne Chellis won't get famous on a "reality" show about wolves like the bath-free Brit who pretends to feed off a deer carcass with his pack.

As a publisher once told me, "People don't want to be educated, they want to be entertained." Common sense and personal observations only prove him right, but it's a bitter pill to know that amateurs who get themselves and others into real trouble by trying to do potentially dangerous things that they aren't qualified to do will always get the fame and the fortune. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the true experts in any field do what they do out of pure love, not for money and attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Gh4-HgR_E