The Bear Grylls Accusations

Some of you may know that everyone's favorite adventurer/explorer, Bear Grylls, has recently been accused of lying to the public on his show: Man versus Wild. Specifically, the accusations include (1) that Bear received assistance from camera crews in carrying his supplies, (2) that his production crew constructed a raft he built on the rainforest episode and (3) that instead of spending a week in the Tundra, he took a break in a five-star hotel and ate blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I would like to address each of these accusations in turn.

1. So at the beginning of each show, Bear is left in the wild with only a few supplies/trash that he recylces into amazing survival supplies. For instance, a shoelace becomes a snare to catch rabbits, a camera lense is turned into a laser to hunt elephants, and a tic tac becomes a grenade capable of taking down an entire pride of allegators. Is it any surprise that Bear used his pocketknife to force the camera crew to carry his stuff??? I mean, come on...you're stuck in the wild, a camera crew is mocking you with their well-fed attitude and insect repellant, and you have a knife. In a survival situation, the sensible thing to do would be threatening to shank the camera crew if they didn't carry your meager belongings. Afterall, calories in the wild are precious and few, and can't be wasted on carrying things that can be carried by an indigenous camera crew.

2. What if Bear had been stranded on a beach with a bunch of giant lincoln logs...would we have faulted him for combining the logs in their natural grooves to form a raft? He had no control over the production crew's ability to leave the scattered components of a raftlike structure crafted by chainsaws and twine, why should we fault him for taking advantage of it? Blaming Bear for refusing to take advantage of his surroundings is like blaming Tom Cruise for telling us all to take vitamins...both are just trying to make us healthier. If you say otherwise, you're asking Americans to die, and that makes you a terrorist.*

3. Again, this "accusation" is easily explained by Bear's natural resourcefulness. If the camera crew left him with a plastic bottle, shattered lightbulb, and coffee grounds, it's safe to assume that Bear could have constructed a five-star hotel overnight. Just like he teaches, the most important task in a survival situation is to construct a reliable shelter. Expecting Bear to ignore a basic survival situation is just like blaming him for walking into civilization then running back into the woods because it was too easy to get rescued. It would be much easier for Bear's haters to question his common sense if he happened upon a Ramada and said "well, I could walk into the hotel, get breakfast, and call for a ride...but that could take days, days I don't have. Instead, I'm going to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, hike through the Ardennes forest, and beg a Frenchman to come to my rescue." Good luck with that scenario.

So in sum, it's easy to make accusations, but with a reasonable explanation, Bear's critics are all exposed as unmitigated dumbasses. If this leads to the cancellation of Man versus Wild, I swear to God I'll make it my life mission to plant trees, close factories, save endangered species, and otherwise make the world an unbearable wilderness that all of Mr. Gryll's haters will not be able to survive. Since that's a world none of us want to see, I'd strongly suggest calling the dogs off**...or Bear will have to eat them raw.

* Unless you are encouraging foreigners to die. That would make you an American.

** Is it too early for a Michael Vick joke?