Don’t touch the animals!

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.

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.

what is “doing earthworks”?

Earthworks

Yucca Valley

Its at the entrance to Pipes Canyon.

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 : )

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 …

I agree, touching any tetrapod in the wilderness is poor form. Amphibious creatures are very delicate and use their skin to breathe. Any residue that is on your hands from insect repellant to sunscreen can harm these delicate creatures. In addition to harming the individual animal when releasing them into the wild after handling they can carry any residue on their skin to places where these animals congregate or become digested by a predator.

So this one is not a backpacker but some outdoor influencer. I hope there are serious legal repercussions. But in the meantime, the video airs and they get more likes and follows regardless. Arggh!  I suppose part of why people do these stupid things is that they don’t understand animals or nature at all, another flaw in our public education system. We sure see evidence of ignorance here in Alaska with tourists that do all kinds of idiotic things around moose. But laughing about the animal mother’s disturbed reaction is truly sick in my view. No sense of compassion at all for the suffering they inflict.

There is ignorance everywhere. It seems to me… even some rescuers sometimes rescue for the purpose of showcasing them on facebook and collecting charity donations (money and gear/food), esp the cute baby animals. It recently happened locally with baby beavers on a social paddle outing. I could not stand what I witnessed, so spoke out about it and angered a few so-called friends.

BTW, in my research on learing about the north american beaver, I ran across an updated furbearer textbook with chapters slowly being put out for free online.

https://www.wildlifeecology.org/fur_book.html