Did Our Planet Lie to Viewers When It Claimed Climate Change Drove Walruses off a Cliff?
By Michael Bastasch Published on April 17, 2019
https://stream.org/planet-lie-viewer...ses-off-cliff/

The Netflix documentary series Our Planet is using chilling footage of walruses falling off a cliff to mislead viewers in the name of climate activism, a Canadian zoologist claimed.

“Our Planet,” narrated by famed naturalist and BBC broadcaster David Attenborough, has a message: Climate change is endangering the planet. But it’s a message that comes at the expense of the facts, according to Susan Crockford, a zoologist and adjunct professor at the University of Victoria.

Crockford argues the Netflix documentary’s iconic scene of walruses falling to their deaths is actually the same incident recorded in Siberia in October 2017. Polar bears were behind those plummeting walruses, not global warming as Our Planet told viewers.

“The lie being told by Attenborough and the film crew is that 200-300 walruses fell during the time they were filming, while in fact they filmed only a few: polar bears were responsible for the majority of the carcasses shown on the beach below the cliff,” Crockford wrote on her personal blog Sunday.

The documentary’s viral walrus scene was filmed at the Kozhevnikova Cape, near the town of Ryrkaypiy. The same place where, in 2017, a group of roughly 20 polar bears spooked a herd of about 5,000 walruses resting near the cliffs, sending many to their deaths. Crockford says Our Planet filmed the same, widely publicized, walrus haul-out, but neglected to mention the polar bears that spooked the walruses.

Our Planet was produced in conjunction with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a prominent environmental group. Each episode highlights an important ecosystem they see as threatened by man-made climate change.

The “Frozen World” episode’s walrus haul-out scene went viral online. WWF used the scene to make walruses the “new symbol of climate change” — apparently, replacing the iconic polar bear. WWF did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment by press time.

The U.K. Telegraph reported that in bonus footage from the Our Planet episode, “many polar bears were seen prowling the tops of the cliffs,” but those polar bears were not seen in actual episode.....