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The father of Australia’s famous “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin has unleashed on an American influencer who posted viral videos of himself catching crocodiles in Far North Queensland.
Mike Holston — also known as ‘The Real Tarzan’ on social media — shared a clip of himself on Friday jumping out of a boat and chasing a freshwater crocodile through ankle-deep water before diving on it.
He is seen laughing as he holds the reptile around the neck and claims, “this is what dreams are made of”.
The 31-year-old, with 15.5 million followers on Instagram alone, said he had dreamed of coming to Australia and seeing crocodiles up close since he was a child.
A couple of days later, despite backlash, there was a new video.
This time Holston chased and caught a small saltwater crocodile on a riverbank.
The saltie was still and silent while the influencer held it by the neck, which experts say is completely uncharacteristic.
In both videos the crocs were seen being released and were tagged as being filmed at Lockhart River on the Cape York Peninsula.
Now Steve Irwin’s father Bob Irwin has come out swinging.
“People visiting our country need to respect our wildlife, or they need to be booted out the door,” he argued in an impassioned statement on Wednesday, which described Mr Holston as a “d*ckhead” and advocated for new nature laws to apply to social media.
The 86-year-old conservationist slammed anyone trying to justify Holston’s act by saying, “but Steve Irwin did it”.
“This isn’t a Steve Irwin issue,” Bob said. “This is about an individual interfering with protected fauna.”
He said comparing Holston’s behavior to his son’s “really gets under (his) skin”.
“You can’t even put them in the same sentence,” he said, calling for the influencer to be prosecuted to the fullest extent current legislation allows.
“In this video the crocodile is clearly under extreme stress – it’s disgusting,” he continued, referring to the freshwater croc that moaned under Holston’s grip.
“Anyone who actually knows how to handle crocodiles knows they don’t respond well to capture. It’s a specialised skill to do it without causing dangerous stress and lactic acid build-up.
“Everything Steve did, from the time he was a little kid, was to respect wildlife and share that message in a way that would give others a healthier respect for animals.”
Bob warned social media was playing a huge role in “encouraging and glorifying” harmful wildlife interactions.
“This new wave of content is taking conservation down a concerning road,” he wrote.
“These posts can have disastrous consequences for both people and wildlife. With crocodiles specifically, they face lethal management when the stunt goes wrong.
“All you’ve got to do is look at incidents in Queensland over the past two years and there’s headlines detailing more reckless behavior with crocodiles as social media stunts. An influencer feeding a cooked chook to a crocodile in Babinda, or another from Canada who was catching freshies for likes and shares.
“It’s like a runaway train and it sets a dangerous precedent for others to copy it. The more dramatic, or cruel the interaction, the more money these accounts make.”
Bob also took aim at authorities.
“The repeated line from our regulators ‘we are investigating’ in response to these incidents is wearing thin,” he said.
“When are the environment authorities, who are tasked with the protection of our native wildlife, going to step up?
“The message is only going to sink in when we see these so-called influencers held to account and understand that 15 million followers don’t make you exempt from the laws that protect our wildlife. It was a free for all back in my day but it isn’t now.”
In an update on Wednesday, the Queensland Environment Department said it was investigating the two videos of a man capturing and restraining a freshwater crocodile and a saltwater crocodile in Far North Queensland.
“These actions are extremely dangerous and illegal, and we are actively exploring strong compliance action including fines to deter any person from this type of behavior,” a spokesman said.
“The maximum penalty for interfering with a saltwater crocodile is $37,500 with an on-the-spot fine (penalty infringement notice) of $8,345.
“Let us be clear: people should not attempt to capture freshwater or saltwater crocodiles in Queensland, unless they trained and licenced to do so.”
news.com.au has reached out to Holston for comment.
Bob Irwin’s comments come after Dr Meg Shaw, Research Fellow at Monash University’s BehaviourWorks — Australia’s leading authorities on behavior change — slammed Holston’s behavior and drew attention to the “disastrous consequences”.
“The more we see this kind of content posted online, the more it is normalised,” Dr Shaw told news.com.au on Monday.
“Viewers can say to themselves ‘oh, this person did it, so it must be fine’. When these posts are paired with a huge volume of likes and comments, it can be even more motivating for viewers to mimic the behavior in pursuit of the same type of attention.”
Dr Shaw said these types of posts can have “disastrous consequences for both humans and wildlife, beyond the immediate risks to serious injury or illness”.
“My research has also shown that content showing human-wildlife interaction can make the animal seem less endangered than it actually is, can increase a viewer’s perception that the animal would make a good pet, and can make the poster appear like they are not respecting animal welfare,” she explained.
“In a way, this content is saying ‘this animal is a prop, not a living being.’”
While Dr Shaw strongly criticized Holston’s act, she praised Australia’s reaction.
“Perhaps the influencer thrives on fuelling outrage, or perhaps he just felt he was above the rules,” she said.
“Either way, those crocodiles were used by the influencer as status symbols to try and show how ‘cool’ he is, rather than how amazing those animals are.
“The good news story is, Australians are proud of the animals that call our country home. Often it’s our mammals that get all the attention, so to see Australia just as protective over the crocodile as it was over the baby wombat is incredibly powerful.
“It’s not just our cute and cuddlies that deserve respect, it’s every creature that calls this country home.”
Earlier this year, another American influencer, Samantha Jo Strable, was filmed separating a baby wombat from its distressed mother.
She was widely criticized – including by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – for her actions, with calls for her to be deported.
Strable later apologized and insisted she was trying to remove the animal from the road to prevent it from being hit, adding she made a “snap judgment” to pick up the marsupial to check if it was sick or hurt.
