While Mr Holston’s videos have been viewed – and liked – by masses of people online, there has also been growing condemnation of his actions. <\/p>\n
Crocodile experts have expressed concern about the saltwater crocodile pictured in particular, saying it is unusual that it wasn’t thrashing about, trying to escape.<\/p>\n
The father of the late Australian naturalist Steve Irwin has also weighed in, suggesting people like Mr Holston should be “booted out the door” if they don’t respect Australia’s wildlife.<\/p>\n
Mr Irwin stressed the behaviour was far removed from the activities of his own son – who died in 2006 – aged 44.<\/p>\n
“This isn’t a Steve Irwin issue. This is about an individual illegally interfering with protected fauna,” Mr Irwin said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“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 – and this bloke clearly had no clue.”<\/p>\n
He said social media is playing a huge role in “glorifying” harmful wildlife interactions, and called for greater penalties for such behaviour – adding the current ones are “laughable” compared to the money that can be made off it online.<\/p>\n
“These posts can have disastrous consequences for both people and wildlife.”<\/p>\n
Mr Holston, though, has defended his actions. In a comment on the video of him handling the saltwater crocodile, he said the animal had been released “after a few up-close looks and photos”.<\/p>\n
He said he did not “encourage anyone to try to recreate” the videos.<\/p>\n
The outrage over Mr Holston’s videos comes just a few months after another US influencer was widely condemned for posting a video of her taking a baby wombat from the side of a road. She appeared to be laughing and running away from the distraught mother wombat.<\/p>\n
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese waded into the discussion back in March, suggesting the woman, Sam Jones, do the same with animals that “can actually fight back”.<\/p>\n
“Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there,” he said to her.<\/p>\n
She left the country soon after anger erupted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Mr Holston’s videos have been viewed – and liked – by masses of people online, there has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-146989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}