Over the past couple of weeks we have been watching the Planet Earth television series with the boys. Through the episodes it tries to display the wide diversity of life all over the planet and at at times doesn’t shy away from showing nature as it really is. Jen and I are worried that we might be scarring Andrew with some of the things he’s seen. There have been scenes where a pride of lions took down a full grown elephant, or another that showed wolves running through a pack of caribou separating the weak from the heard and taking down a baby. To be fair they occasionally show the underdog getting away but those aren’t the ones that end up sticking in your mind. (We’ve tried covering Andrew’s eyes during some scenes but he gets mad and squirms away so he can see.)

We typically take two nights to watch a single episode and the other night we were finishing up the one on the Shallow Seas. Even by Planet Earth standards this one seemed to have much more predator on prey action with one segment featuring great white sharks hunting Cape fur seals off the coast of South Africa. I’m sure you’ve all seen the pictures of the sharks breaching the water tossing the seals about in very dramatic fashion with the highlight being a new type of video photography that allowed them to capture all this action in super high-def slow motion. Of course they couldn’t let this new technology go to waste so there were many slow motion shots with poor seals being flung through the air.

After this had calmed down the episode wrapped up with a group of king penguins on the Marion Island. Everything looked very innocent with mothers feeding their young but it suddenly took dark and sinister turn when they panned over to a group of fur seas sitting on the beach separating the penguin nests from the sea. David Attenborough, the narrator, chimes in with “The penguins need to cross the beach filled with fur seals that have acquired a taste for penguin blubber.” Nothing good came come from a statement like this.

Sure enough the very next thing we see are the penguins slowly hobbling across the beach getting attacked by the seas. This turned out to be more then Andrew could take. He’s eyes got huge and he turned to Jen and in horror yelled

“They aren’t eating the mommies are they?”

“Oh no, no, no! Those aren’t the mommies.” There is no way he is going to be buy that, who else would they be eating?

“Ok. They’re just eating the grandma’s and grandpas, right, not the mommies.”

“Right, just grandma and grandpa’s, not the mommies.”

And that was good enough for him.