The Cruelest Show On TV, Discovery's “Yukon Men” Exposed for What it is: Lies in Order to Gain Viewers: Money from Cruelty

What a great article.  Please visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/nature-up/2013/may/17/bloodthirtsty-wildlife-documentaries-reality-ethics to read it in whole.  In essence, the author does a great job of proving that Yukon Men and others’ like it literally lie about wolves, wolverines, bears, etc. stating they are mean and killers in order to grow viewership.  In essence, it’s all cruelty just for ratings.  They lie about the true nature of the majestic animals that need to be left alone.  Discovery Channel can f..k off and I hope you all do not support them.

I’ve pasted some text below to summarize, but again, please visit the story at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/nature-up/2013/may/17/bloodthirtsty-wildlife-documentaries-reality-ethics

“Frenetic edits and manic music are used to build drama, authoritative-sounding voiceovers combine with the tightly edited words of the on-screen characters tell how dangerous, vicious or deadly the creatures we're seeing on screen are. I spot occasions where animal noises seem to have been overdubbed to make them sound scarier. It makes for gripping viewing, but I wondered if Discovery wasn't betraying its viewers who trust it to deliver reliable, factual TV. As a trained zoologist and filmmaker, much of what I was seeing didn't make sense to me.

Take wolverines for example: I lived in Alaska for almost a year and never saw one. They're extremely shy and avoid humans. Although they're capable predators of small animals and found in many cold, high-latitude regions of the northern hemisphere, I'd never heard of a wolverine killing a person.

I searched the web and could not find a single documented case of a wolverine even attacking a person anywhere in the world, ever.

To double-check, I emailed Jeff Copeland of the Wolverine Foundation, who told me that "we are not aware of any instance in which a wolverine has killed a human, or even attempted to do so", which perhaps explains why the wolverines in Yukon Men are doing their desperate best to get away from their human assailants.

Wolves are a lot larger than wolverines, of course. But even though the US and Canada hold over 60,000 wolves, I found only two records of fatal attacks by wild wolves in these countries in last ten years; one controversial case in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 2005, which some experts think was actually a bear attack, and another in Alaska in 2010.

Why did the producers of Yukon Men tell their viewers that there had been twenty fatal wolf attacks in the last ten years, implying that these had taken place around Tanana? Why does a 'factual' show portray Alaskan wolves as man-eating monsters straight out of Victorian fairytales, a serious threat to life and limb, when the data show that wolf attacks are extremely rare in North America?

Idaho-based wolf expert Suzanne Stone told me that she'd once been surrounded by a howling pack of gray wolves while sitting by a campfire in the twilight, armed only with a marshmallow on a stick. The animals were only twenty or thirty yards away. Was she scared, I asked? "No, not at all. It was an incredible experience. I howled back and forth with them", adding that people and domestic livestock were the most dangerous creatures she'd encountered in many years of walking in wolf-inhabited backcountry.”