"Cheetah on the Prowl", Take 5

Attenborough makes a really good point about manipulation in nature documentaries. I had never before really thought about filmmakers needing to more or less reenact scenes of nature rather than capture them live, but it made much more sense considering time and budget constraints. It would make even less sense if film crews were lucky enough to be at the right time and at the right place for each natural phenomenon caught on tape. Considering that this is a common practice, it can be said that nature documentaries are not entirely "realistic", and that's just fine by me. For me, manipulations and set ups are reasonable as long as they are of events that would naturally occur anyway. If a family of cheetahs would naturally eat a dead gazelle, then there really is nothing wrong with a gazelle carcass being artificially located near the cheetahs. The reenactments become unethical when they depict events that do not occur in the wild, such as the Lemming suicides, or those that wouldn't happen under normal circumstances, such as a bloody battle between a hippo and a shark. Obviously, film makers should also try their best to film an organic act of nature, and use manipulation only as a backup plan. I've always thought that the main endeavor of a nature documentary is to teach, and therefore reenactments should be allowed in order to teach viewers about the wonders of nature