preview

Steve Irwin's Obituary

Decent Essays

Steve Irwin, an animal activist, a member of the Australia zoo and a TV star. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people watched as a, what some would call psychotic, man would swim with sharks and lay down with Komodo dragons. The question that arises from his actions is, were his habits a main cause in his death. He had done this all his life, but at what risk? His own, the animals, for the longest time nothing went wrong. Until the day Glen Collins of the New York Times had to write Mr. Irwin’s obituary. On September 4, 2006 Glenn Collins prepared an obituary about Mr. Irwin, who was impaled in the heart by a stingray barb, while filming a documentary at the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s northeast coast. Witnesses on his boat and a nearby diving vessel said that he came close to a stingray and its barb pierced his chest and lodged in his heart. (Glenn Collins, 2006) On that day Prime Minister John Howard termed the death “a huge loss to Australia,” and called Mr. Irwin “a wonderful character, and a passionate …show more content…

Irwin grew up on a reserve with his mother and father, and by the age of 9 he was out with his father in the rivers and swamps catching crocodiles. He played with snakes and lizards throughout his life and as he got older I would like to think so did his “pets”. After his parents retired Mr. Irwin took over the family business and expanded their small reptile preserve and made it into the now Australia zoo. This meant he not only had to expand his knowledge of the species he had but to learn about the ones that he was bringing in. How better for the man with a love for animals to see how they act in their natural environment? He went there; he traveled the globe finding and studying how elephants behave, what the tigers acted like around each other, feeding habits of sharks and all sorts of other animals. Every time he interacted closely with an animal that most would find dangerous and he walked away, mostly unscathed for the most

Get Access