Vladislav Zhynov
Mr. Randy Schmidt
WRI 102-25
6/27/2015
I thought they were my family
Timothy Treadwell was a former drug addict, who was inspired by grizzly bears and decided that he will do anything to protect them and their habitat. He raised awareness for the bears by going to schools and giving speeches on their necessity in our environment and their importance in the ecosystem, encouraging children to protect the wild animals as well. For fourteen summers before his untimely death, he visited Alaska and found himself comfortable with those creatures, and connected with them in a way few can describe. His passion drove him insane, and he purposely risked his life on a daily basis interacting with the bears in their natural habitat. He did not care about anything going on around him and cut himself off from society, deciding that his goal was to protect those animals. He thought that he was a man above all others and above government authority, and believed he “beat the system”. His confidence was of that of a mentally insane person. His inflated ego was a product of the new environment he placed himself into; the grizzlies could not mentally challenge him, so he convinced himself that he had risen above those still confined in society. There was no one out there that could tell him that he is an idiot for doing certain things, no one there that can explain what is actually going on, or just give their opinion on certain things. Timothy Treadwell reinvented himself in the wilderness, the story of a solitary human among the grizzly bears that end up being a well writen cautionary tail of what we shouldn’t be doing.
Timothy’s sheer insanity and lack of respect for authority made him “escape society” and travel to Alaska, where he was to spend his summer talking to bears and trying to show his authority over the wild beasts, to stand his ground on their territory and invade their space as his space was once invaded by people who expected normalcy in...