Netflix viewers are being left completely broken by the walrus scene in ‘Our Planet’

The famous David Attenborough and his documentaries have managed to touch us so many times. However, a scene in his newest Netflix show it’s called by many “the most harrowing moment so far.” The animal show, called ‘Our Planet,’ narrated by David Attenborough includes a really disturbing footage. And it shows perfectly, how careless humans are with planet Earth.

A heartbreaking scene illustrates the struggling life walruses are forced to live, because of humans. It follows the large flippered marine mammals as they are stranded on a cliff, left confused by a combination of shrinking ice cover and their own poor eyesight, VT reports.

“They do so out of desperation not choice. Their natural home is out on the sea ice, but the ice has retreated away to the north and this is the closest place to their feeding grounds, ” Sr. David explained the scene.

“Every square inch is occupied, climbing over the tightly packed bodies is the only way across the crowd – those beneath can get crushed to death. In a desperate bid to avoid the crush they try head towards the cliffs.

“But walruses’ eyesight out of the water is poor, but they can sense the others down below, as they get hungry they need to return to the sea. In their desperation to do so, hundreds fall from heights they should never have scaled.”

Commenting on the footage, Sophie Lanfear, who produced and directed the episode, told the New York Times that filming the walruses was one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. “The walrus scenes were the hardest things I’ve ever had to witness or film in my career,” she said. “I really wasn’t prepared for the scale of death. A small group of maybe six or seven would make it down safely, and we’d all celebrate. But the vast majority do not.”

She continued: “They basically walk themselves off the cliff. The walruses are used to a soft landing. Their depth perception hasn’t evolved to deal with a cliff situation, nor have they evolved to work out how to get back the way they came. So it’s just tragic. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

Susan Crockford, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, claimed the animals were more likely to have been driven over the cliffs after being chased by polar bears and described the scenes as “contrived nonsense”.

“This powerful story is fiction and emotional manipulation at its worst. ‘The walruses shown in this Netflix film were almost certainly driven over the cliff by polar bears during a well-publicised incident in 2017, not because they were confused by a combination of shrinking ice cover and their own poor eyesight,” Susan told the Telegraph.

“Even if the footage shown by Attenborough was not the 2017 incident in Ryrkaypiy, we know that walruses reach the top of cliffs in some locations and might fall if startled by polar bears, people or aircraft overhead, not because they are confused by shrinking sea ice cover.”

 

However, Lanfear defended the show, saying the segment is very real and two crew members had watched the animals fall.

She said: “We filmed Pacific walrus falling from high cliffs. They were not being driven off the cliffs by the polar bears and we know this because we had two team members watching the cliffs from afar who could see the polar bears and were in radio communications with us to warn us about any bears approaching the crew closer to the walrus and the cliffs.”

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