Sir David Attenborough, doyen of wildlife TV, has been accused of manufacturing ‘tragedy porn’ after misrepresenting footage of walruses plunging to their deaths over a cliff on his Netflix latest nature series Our Planet.

The show’s footage of ‘desperate’ walruses clinging to the cliff top before tumbling hundreds of feet onto the rocks below attracted widespread publicity . The Times of London ran it with the dramatic headline: “David Attenborough’s Our Planet: Walruses plunging to deaths become new symbol of climate change.”

The moving scenes prompted a mass outbreak of sobbing and hysteria on social media.

According to Attenborough’s whispery voiceover, trembling with emotion, the cause of the walruses’ tragic deaths was the decline of their sea ice hunting grounds caused — of course! — by global warming.

For further details, he advises at the end, viewers should contact the show’s partners the WWF.

Attenborough claims in his voiceover that the walruses are driven to climb the rocks “out of desperation not choice.”

He continues:

Very moving, but also completely untrue. The more likely explanation is that the walruses were driven to their deaths by polar bears — which herded them over the cliff and then feasted on the bodies afterwards.

This incident, which was recorded in 2017 in village of Ryrkaypiy, in eastern Siberia, was well-documented at the time.

Click Here: geelong cats guernsey 2019

According to polar bear expert Susan Crockford:

According to Andrew Montford in the Spectator, the Our Planet footage was almost certainly shot in this region at this time:

This is far from the only misrepresentation of the facts in this tendentious, manipulative series. As Paul Homewood has also noticed, the series is little more than a propaganda exercise for its WWF partners and is riddled with dubious claims and factual errors.

Not for the first time, Sir David Attenborough has been caught green-handed, squandering his prestige and his “national treasure” status by misleading viewers, mispresenting the facts in order to scare his audience with alarmist environmentalist propaganda.