BAMBI AGAIN

Rex Burress

One of the most distressing pictures of the 2017 fire season around Oroville, was of a shabby deer inspecting its burnt-out habitat.

The well-timed photograph shows the deer with its mouth open as if calling out in dismay at the sight of nothing green to browse on amid the charred branches. Photographer Bill Husa of the M-R made the descriptive shot up along Lumpkin Road after the Ponderosa Fire swept through the woods. The deer's hair is singed, the antler looks damaged, and the hind quarters are coated with a red-brown color probably from the fire-retardant.

The sight was as pathetic as the fire-ravaged, man-invaded, woodland habitat of the original, animated, fictitious film version of Bambi, where his mother was shot by a hunter and their careless campfire destroyed the home of Bambi, Thumper, Flower, and the wild community!

Some of that scenario rings true with the Ponderosa Fire—the careless match and the destruction of untold wildlife right down to the spider in its web. The loss of the small life is what's staggering, even though we see more of the deer and the squirrel tragedies. How many million insects and snails? How long for reestablishment?

Thinking of the Bambi story and the anthropomorphic slant of giving animals human personalities is one way of viewing nature, although the Bambi [Disney] outlook is a distorted dimension from the real world of wildlife. The fire caused by hunters in the film induces some of the fear that people, and maybe wildlife, feel in real fires like the Ponderosa Fire.

The Bambi movie came from a book, “Bambi; A Life in the Woods,” written by the Austrian author Felix Salten in 1923, who was trying to promote wildlife conservation by emphasizing the chaos man can inflict in environments. It is considered the first environmental publication. The original novel is poetic and informative, but altered greatly when Disney made it into the animated movie in 1942.

The Bambi film was highly opposed by sportsmen as the episode that featured Bambi's mother getting shot and the escaped campfire put hunters in a bad light. The conflict between preservationists and hunters still occurs in some circles, although the hunting harvest of the surplus is widely accepted as good wildlife management in the moderate outlook. Still, there are those who don't want any wild animal to die even though death is a valid part of nature's web of life. It is part of the extreme viewpoint we see in so much of society that causes grief and misunderstanding in many fields.

Bambi was considered an “eloquent message of nature conservation” and preceded Smokey Bear as a Forest Service symbol of woodland protection. I recall the artsy Missouri Nature Knight pledge card I signed in the 1940's was rimmed with all those Bambi characters. But the 'Sunday School sweet world of Bambi' was a nature distorted-world without predators. Even Woodsy Owl was friends with Thumper rabbit. “Bambi deer never kills anything.” But the implication was that the hunters, in shooting Bambi's mother, created a fear that even Stephan King said frightened him most as a child.

The hunter's outcry against the suggestion of their killer image led to public opposition against Aldo Leopold's deer management research of reducing deer for the good of habitat in the 1940's. Professor Ralph H. Lutts, author of “The Nature Fakers,” jumped in with articles for “Outdoor Life,” centered around “the trouble with Bambi.”

Some anthropomorphical writing, particularly Thornton Burgess' “Little Bedtime Stories of Peter Rabbit,” were especially good at weaving in authentic nature truths, that was also the original intention of the Bambi stories. Switching from non-fiction to fiction takes a little imagination, but can be very beneficial in revealing subtle realities of nature.

“Too much safety yields only danger in the long run.”

“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no audience to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. He is guided by his own conscience...I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.” –Aldo Leopold