Monday, March 10, 2014

Timothy's Motives

            While watching Grizzly Man, I was somewhat skeptical of Timothy Treadwell’s motives for living with the grizzlies. He certainly helped bring awareness to the bears through his videos and public speaking. Nevertheless, he disobeyed park rules that were specifically enacted to protect the bears and their environment. He was also living with bears in a federally protected preserve, in which they were not exposed to any outside dangers. While some people interviewed in the film thought that Treadwell’s actions were idiotic, I never specifically heard anyone mention that he was selfish. However, when I heard the quote “The bears saved Timmy as much as Timmy saved the bears,” this was exactly the word I thought of.

            As a climber myself and someone who has read some literature on mountaineering, I have noticed that the word selfish is directed toward climbers a lot. They seemingly risk it all to pursue a lofty, distant summit. In a similar way, I believe Timothy Treadwell chose to live with the bears in large part for his own satisfaction. His passion for the bears is evident in every single video clip, as well as his excitement and glee at living with them. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing; I just question that Timothy’s main motive was solely to save the bears, especially since he may have done the bears in the preserve more harm than good.

3 comments:

  1. In my opinion, Treadwell stayed with the bears in order to protect them. However, it does seem rather odd that he would feel that the bears need protecting because they resided in a national reserve. I never considered Treadwell being selfish, but after you mentioned it, selfish seems a word that could describe his situation. The bears could be to Treadwell a protection from the outside world, almost like a sense of security. He was able to live in the human world, but seemed to thrive while living with the grizzlies. I am not discounting Treadwell's obvious love and purpose of protecting the bears, but there were plenty of other ways to fight the harming of grizzlies.

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  2. So is it selfish to need to be saved by others? Whether or not Timothy did nothing for the bears during his lifetime, hundreds of people have seen this documentary, which would mean that in the end his motives could not have been selfish in any way. I dont think we can blame him for his issues, and we obviously cant blame him for wanting to protect animals. I do think he had other underlying issues, but he definitely caused awareness.

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  3. Maybe we focus too much on why he's there. Who cares why he's there? If he is happy living the end of his life out in a way that makes him happy who are we to judge? We talked a lot about how he's not actually saving the bears, but like we said no one really asked him to. As long as he was happy and doing what he loved in his head I think that is all that should matter.

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