Steve Plays With Crocodile
Photo Source: GNU Free Documentation License

Many men secretly wish that they were someone else. Someone who was more exciting and did daring deeds and had admirers. Steve Irwin was such a man, the man that many of us wish we were. You might not know him by his given name, but I bet you knew him as the Crocodile Hunter. Steve was one of the most popular people in Australia. His name was almost a household word there. Thanks to the expansion of channels on tv, Americans became familiar with him too.

Steve was a great conservationist as were his parents, who moved to Queensland when he was eight years old, to open a reptile park. He was raised with wild animals and enjoyed every minute of it. Everyone could see that the Crocodile Hunter enjoyed every minute of his life. He didn't even seem to be bothered too much by the nips and bites he would occasionally receive. When he did get bit or scratched he would mutter the word crikey. I understand that he was so popular in Australia that half the country would mutter that word. When Steve was only nine years old, his father let him wrestle an alligator. He didn't seem to be any the worse for it. I wonder how many people reading this can say they did the same thing at any age?

Irwin spent his childhood hunting for rats and mice to feed the reptiles in the park. He also liked to fish. The park eventually became his. All was not rosy for him however. His ways seemed strange to many people and in 2004 he got himself into trouble. He had brought his son with him at crocodile feeding time and was holding him on his arm while he fed a chicken to a croc. The public went nuts. He just didn't see anything wrong with this and probably didn't until the day of his death. He felt that there was no danger and children should learn about wild animals.

He began making documentaries and they became so popular that he made over seventy hours of them. He also had a couple of shows on tv that were very popular. I knew some people that never looked at wildlife shows, but they would never miss his. I think that this is quite a tribute to the man. We can all see him now wearing those khaki shorts and shirt and getting ready to grab a gator and wrestle him to the ground. For those of you that have seen a live croc or gator, I don't think I have to tell you how scary they look. If death was an animal, I think it would choose to be one of these. As he wrestled it you might hear him say the famous crikey word.

Steve Irwin was born on February 22, 1962 in Melbourne, Australia. He began to catch crocs at nine years old and later worked as a crocodile hunter. He married an American lady from Eugene, Oregon and had two children, a boy 3 years old and a girl 8 years old.

Since Irwin was so enthusiastic, he would sometimes get himself in trouble. Oh it was not with the animals themselves, but with humans. He had made a documentary in Antarctica. I have never heard of anything like this, but he was accused of getting too close to some of the animals. Its not like he hurt them, and one of the animals was a whale, for goodness sake. No action was taken against him. This certainly seems ridiculous on the face of it, doesn't it? Steve may have done more for promoting conservation and Australia than anyone in the last 50, or indeed the last 100 years.

Irwin died on September 3, 2006 while shooting a documentary named "Ocean's Deadliest". It seems that he swam over a Stingray and the ray, which has a barb at the end of its tail that is poisonous and about 10 inches long, shoved it through his heart. This was a bizarre and shocking end for a man that faced danger ever day and that danger was considered much more ominous from crocs and alligators than from a fish. As a matter of fact, only three people have did this way in the last 100 years. Goodbye Steve, we loved your shows and we wish you well, where ever you are.

Even though he has just died, thousands of tributes have already been dropped off at his zoo.