I went to the John Byrne website to read what comments could make someone post that ebay comment.
John Byrne, is a big fucking piece of shit. He just goes on and on, relentlessly, from the day Irwin's death was announced, that Irwin was "an asshole". Then, later on saying, he should be skinned alive and thrown into the deepest, darkest pits of Africa, all the time using the incident with Irwin's baby and croc as justification, because he feels he knows more about the danger of crocodiles than a man who spent his entire life, with experience from generations before him, existing with them.
Byrne can think, and he can say, Irwin is an asshole. But to call Irwin and asshole, and worse, on the day of his death, in a thread meant to honour his memory, and to not let up but get more and more offensive as the thread continues, shows him to be a total piece of shit, incapable of understanding that anything could exist beyond his sphere of knowledge.
It is a shame that Steve Irwin passed away so quickly. He was, from all sources that I could tell, a genuinely wonderful man.
A lot of people had a real problem when he brought his infant son into a playpen with a live crocodile in front of spectators. Mainly because of two things – firstly, the pictures shown of the incident crop out the half dozen crocodile handlers and attendants present, are unable to depict that the croc had been feed several times that very day and was the oldest and slowest croc around, and are often shown depicting, through perspective, a much closer relationship between Irwin and the croc than actually happened (not least the angles that make it look like Irwin is taunting the croc with his child – on a side note, you have to wonder that if Irwin is an asshole for doing it, what the hell the people watching right there are). The second thing people forget is that, to Irwin, crocs were a very normal part of life for him and his family. Because all we know of crocs is the killers of the world and what we've read in biology books – since none of us have ever actually experienced the croc as anything other than a predator, we are incapable, a lot of the time, of comprehending how much knowledge this man had on crocs and their behaviour. I remember seeing him comment on a reality tv show where one of the tasks was to swim away from a croc, and he pointed out how through camera angles there was no danger, that there would've been attendants of all kinds, and that the type of croc (he could tell by looking) was not fierce towards humans. The guy knew his business.
Which is kind of ironic he dies from the stingray, something that's happened less than 20 times in recorded history. To him, there was no danger from the stingray. And he'd know.
Shame, the man really was capable of expressing the passion and love for wildlife (and life in general) and instilling it in others.
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