Don’t touch the animals!

[AK Granola]

I think I’ve posted on this before, but sitting down after work tonight and watching one of the YouTubers I follow brought it all back again, my total frustration with human behavior in the backcountry. At 8:02 on this video, they pick up and handle a desert tortoise. Argh! Illegal to pick up, it’s an endangered species, and with tens of thousands of subscribers, now tells everyone this is something they can and should do while out hiking, because their model backpacker did it. Fun! Let’s go catch a tortoise! So every person coming past that poor tortoise will harass it or any others they find. I’ve seen this with snakes, birds, baby birds, horned lizards (lots of manhandling of those all over YouTube, including Dixie, Jupiter…). Like your Kindergarten teacher said, keep your hands to yourself.

Let’s get “don’t touch the animals, not a single one of them” added to the understanding of leave no trace and to the ethic of every single backpacker, YouTuber, influencer! Just look, don’t touch. How hard would it be to get the community as focused on this as they are on TP flowers or don’t stack rocks or whatever? Are we doomed to love everything to death?

[Adrian Griffin]

Yikes, catching and picking up a tortoise is totally idiotic.

That said, I give most of the influencers a fair-to-sorta-good score on low-impact backpacking practices. If anyone has ideas on how to influence the influencers, I’m all ears.

[Terran Terran]

I’ve watched a guy catch arattle snake.  We were doing earthworks and they were filming a documentary. Right away they started filming it. Stupid way to get on camera. It never did air.

[Jerry Adams]

what is “doing earthworks”?

[Terran Terran]

Earthworks

Yucca Valley

Its at the entrance to Pipes Canyon.

 

[Jerry Adams]

Those are cool

Sort of like the ones in south america that are thousands (?) of year old

I’m sure some people will criticize as not LNT : )

[Terran Terran]

The conditions were that they couldn’t disturb the landscape. United Nations funded it. It was on sacred Indian land. A group lead by Steve Reevis came out to bless it. I worked with 3 Israeli architects. The way I see it, they could have put a building up. I do agree with you though.

 

[Terran Terran]

I’ve stopped and moved tortoises in the road. Folks relocate them which is wrong. It spreads disease. Feeding the birds attracts the ravens, so its also a no-no. You can adopt them when they’re displaced. I actually built a tortoise pen once. No corners. They’ll climb and flip over. They give you a stamp that goes on the shell.

I saw a report about 100 dead pronghorn after our last storm. They get trapped on the roads when the snow piles up by the barbwire fences. They don’t jump. They go under.

[MJ H]

I’m not around tortoises that I’ve ever noticed. When I was at boy scout camp, this kid picked up a garter snake and showed it around. Of course he got bitten, because that’s how you get bitten by snakes. He ran screaming to his dad, who was one of the leaders. His dad told him that it was a rattle snake and that he was going to die. Which we boys thought was hilarious at the time, but having raised a kid myself, it was probably not the ideal adult behavior.

[Terran Terran]

Rattlesnake bite is most common in young men who often are intoxicated and have purposely handled a venomous snake.

Rattlesnake Bites in Southern California and Rationale for Recommended Treatment

[AK Granola]

I have to admit I picked up a lot of wild critters when I was a kid, mostly in my backyard. Snakes for sure (hog-nosed, bull, fox, and garter snakes and never got bit), frogs, crickets, baby bunnies, whatever. But times have changed and our understanding of LNT has changed too, or so I would have thought. We don’t feed bears at national parks for fun, or leave garbage for them, or build wooden furniture out of trees at campsites. There are 8 billion of us now.

[Jerry Adams]

I’ve picked up garter snake in my youth.  They are very smelly.

I don’t normally pick up creatures now.  Maybe to rescue it.  Although probably best to just let creatures alone.

[Arthur]

The desert tortoise is unique. It urinates to deter predators but that comes with a liability. It recycles its urine for water usage and if it empties it’s bladder, it needs fresh water very soon or it will die. In the desert, it can be months for the next rain.  Therefore, picking up a tortoise and having it pee can be its death sentence.  The response on the referenced post by the numbskull perpetrator was defensive of his actions and showed he neither understood the issue nor was willing to learn from his stupidity.

[Dan]

Yeah, I never touch animals in the wilderness. The video is apparently marketing/self-promotion, and it’s no surprise to anyone that so-called experts are promoting bad behavior on the internet. It’s bad enough that they did it, but then they compounded the mistake by advertising it. Very unfortunate.

This does remind me of an interesting thing that happened a few years ago. I was driving down the street from my home and came to the first three-way intersection with stop signs all around. Normal residential tertiary road traffic. There was a massive alligator snapping turtle right in the middle of the intersection! At least two feet across and three feet long. And as you know, they are really scary and prehistoric looking. I do see them in local ponds, but the nearest pond wasn’t very close, so this one must have followed a seasonal ditch and then made a detour. Two of us did pick it up and move it off the road next to the ditch, and I called the county wildlife office to report it. I didn’t see it again, so I hope it was ok. Sometimes they get themselves in trouble in our developed environment, unfortunately. I have photos somewhere …

 

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