Best Man for the Beast Beat Lives on the Animal Planet

A big ol’ Egyptian cobra, maybe 6 feet long, is lying in the African sun, minding its own darn business. Which is how you want to leave an Egyptian cobra. Steve Irwin can tell you: One bite from these fellas and--crikey!--you’re history. Or soon will be.

But here comes Irwin, scurrying after the serpent with the naive excitement of an 8-year-old bagging crawdads. The cobra senses what’s afoot and tries to slither away. But Irwin is quicker. He corners the big boy.

“This is the most aggressive animal I’ve ever come across!” Irwin shouts into the TV camera, sounding quite pleased. “He’s a super-aggressive snake. Crikey! And big, too!”

Well, you’d be aggressive, too, if someone were grabbing at your nether regions, which is what Irwin does next to the cobra. The snake decides it’s had enough. Rising up, hood flaring, it strikes with frightening speed--once, twice, thrice--missing Irwin each time. Irwin goes goony with excitement. “I’ve never seen a snake more aggressive in my life! Woo-hoo! He has a lot of venom.”

And then . . . peace. Reassured by Irwin (“You’re all right, mate, you’re all right”), the snake settles calmly onto a low-lying branch. Irwin moves in closer, finally bringing himself nostril-to-nostril with the reptile. Eventually, everyone goes home happy.

All in a day’s work, mate. On his cable TV show, “Crocodile Hunter,” the hyperbolic Australian canoodles with carpet vipers, scorpions, diamondbacks and rattlers. He wanders through bat caves, swims with monitor lizards and hustles after crocs and Komodo dragons. No matter how ornery, toxic or just plain icky, Irwin annoys them all.

“Crocodile Hunter,” which airs on the Animal Planet cable network, is “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” meets “Mad Max.” Dispensing with the hushed voices and telephoto shots of traditional nature programming, Irwin gallops with abandon into the Australian outback or African veld to encounter the beasts himself.

Some people tempt fate; Irwin chucks it under the chin, scratches it behind the ears and grabs its tail. Irwin and his wife and co-host, Terri, say they’re wildlife educators, but they’re primarily high-wire entertainers. The prospect of seeing Steve get chewed on by one of his co-stars is the show’s unique selling proposition and undoubtedly explains its appeal among young men. The animals must be potentially lethal, or at least nearly so, to rate Irwin’s attention.

“I’m showing people that these aren’t evil, ugly monsters. These aren’t things that should have their heads cut off,” says Irwin, 37. “If I can give you the sensation of what it’s really like to be with these animals, it’s that much more exciting and captivating. Let’s face it, a 20-year-old college kid isn’t going to get jazzed” by a traditional approach.

Irwin’s cult following--Web sites, merchandise, even an animated tribute-parody on television’s “South Park”--attests to the formula’s success. “Crocodile Hunter” averages about 750,000 viewers per week on Animal Planet, which also carries a second show starring the Irwins, “Croc Files,” for younger viewers.

*

For Americans trained to recognize Australians by “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” movies and Foster’s beer commercials, Irwin fits a comfortable stereotype. Perpetually clad in khaki shorts and hiking boots, Irwin is a can-do bloke with the emphatic delivery of an infomercial pitchman. “Danger! Danger!” is a signature Irwin exclamation, which, in his thick accent, comes out as “dain-jah, dain-jah.”

Irwin makes sure there’s plenty of dain-jah and adventure. Here he is encountering a nest of Komodo dragons on Sumatra: “Now, this is really dangerous,” he tells viewers as he lies down among the creatures. “They could easily mistake me for a wounded prey and have a go at me.” They don’t.

And here is Irwin combat-crawling up to a pack of ravenous vultures as they feed off the bloated remains of a hippo: “One of my wildest boyhood dreams was getting close enough so that I was sharing the carcass with vultures,” he confesses.

These sorts of stunts endear Irwin to his fans. But they make some reptile experts hiss. Professional herpetologists say Irwin sacrifices safety and scientific accuracy for ratings.

“For someone who knows what they’re doing, getting right up into the face of a snake might not be a dangerous thing,” says Roger Rosscoe, a herpetologist at Washington’s National Zoo. “But kids watch this program. I wouldn’t want them to take the same chances he does. I worry about it.”

“Let’s be diplomatic about this. He’s a showman,” says George Zug, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. He says it’s “misinformation” to constantly underscore the dangers snakes pose to humans, as Irwin does.

“Yes, people have occasionally been bitten by snakes, but it’s generally because they were doing something they shouldn’t have,” Zug says. “If you go up to a snake and start prodding it or beating it with a stick, what do you expect an animal to do but to protect itself? In point of fact, unless an animal feels cornered, it will get out of your way or remain still. 1/8Irwin 3/8 just emphasizes how dangerous they are. . . . I get so annoyed I can’t watch him.”

Irwin and producer John Stainton say theatrics are necessary. “We’re entertainment-based,” Stainton says. “We’re not scientific. We’re going to an audience that has never watched wildlife documentaries before. Every e-mail we get says we’ve made wildlife entertaining.”

“I think we give enough warning” to viewers, Stainton says. “Steve is constantly saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s incredibly dangerous.’ ”

For a guy who invites animals to bite back, Irwin has been remarkably fortunate. He recalls only one or two really life-threatening encounters in 30-plus years of handling critters. And though he says he gets tagged “pretty regularly” by snakes, most are nicks no worse than a cat bite. He’s never been bitten by a venomous snake--a good thing, since the Irwins work without medical supervision, often in locations so remote that even communicating with a doctor is impossible.

“I don’t want to seem arrogant or bigheaded, but I have a real instinct with animals,” Irwin says. “I’ve grown up with them. Imagine my pride and honor when I got 60 or 70 feet up in a tree”--on a location shoot in Sumatra--”and a female orangutan with a baby swung down and put her arm around me. It’s like I have an uncanny supernatural force rattling around in my body. I tell you what, mate, it’s magnetism!”

Critics in Australia, where Irwin first gained stardom in 1992, say it could be something else. They’ve suggested that some of Irwin’s encounters are staged, that Irwin will use zoo-raised crocs as stand-ins for the more aggressive and unpredictable wild variety. Irwin has branded these allegations “blatant lies.” Animal Planet spokesman Matt Katsive acknowledges that some corners are trimmed to meet tight production deadlines but says these are trivial: “They will occasionally put a snake in a tree for educational purposes, but the actual experience of stalking the animals is 1/8authentic 3/8.”

Neither Irwin nor his wife has formally studied reptiles or earned a degree in animal science. Irwin says his education came from his father, a plumber-turned-zookeeper who encouraged his son to catch and examine snakes starting at age 4. For his sixth birthday, Stevie received a 10-foot scrub python he named Fred. By 9, he was wrasslin’ his first crocodile.

*

He was trained as a diesel mechanic but often spent months helping his father relocate wild crocs that were threatened by human settlements. When his parents retired in 1991, Irwin took over the family business, becoming director of the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park (now the Australia Zoo), a facility his parents founded north of Brisbane. He also met Terri, a tourist and animal-rescue specialist from Eugene, Ore., at the zoo that year. They married six months later.

In 1990, his old friend Stainton had come to the zoo to shoot a TV commercial, and Irwin showed home movies of his crocodile encounters. “I loved the rawness of them,” Stainton says. “They were so real. I thought, this guy ought to be on TV.”

*

Two years later, Irwin was called by the Queensland government to move a croc. Stainton came along to film that adventure, which became the first “Crocodile Hunter” documentary and an instant hit on Australian television. “It was just like being in an Indiana Jones movie,” Terri recalls.

Lately, the Irwins’ biggest challenge may be to figure out how to keep their animal adventures fresh, especially after three seasons. Some hard-core fans grump that the show is getting slicker, if not better. But Terri Irwin figures there are still plenty of new places for Steve to get into trouble, mentioning Russia, the Middle East, South America and Alaska.

Their 16-month-old daughter, Bindi Sue, already shows signs of following her parents. Bindi (an aboriginal word meaning young girl; it’s also the name of one of the Irwins’ favorite crocodiles) enjoys playing with wallabies and koalas. “But her favorite is snakes,” including Terri’s 10-foot boa, says Steve proudly.

Crikey.