When I was a kid growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, feeding seals and sea lions down at the wharf was one of my favorite things to do. Huge, fat, bleary-eyed sea lions, drunk off buckets of fish tourists buy to feed them swim around the wharf, waiting for their free meal. They’re incredibly cute. They’re also not pet dogs. Despite the fact that they’re wild animals, you’d often see tourists doing stupid shit like holding fish in their mouths, bending right down over the edge, and letting a sea lion grab it. Cool, but dumb.
The video you see above was filmed in Richmond, B.C., just a ferry ride away from my hometown. Michael Fujiwara happened to be at Steveston Fishing Wharf, another place where people feed wild animals. At first, he figured he was just filming a cute encounter with a sea lion… until the sea lion yanked the girl into the water with it. “The sea lion actually attracted a lot of attention from the visitors there, including the young girl,” he said. “She and her family, I guess, they came, they started feeding the animal bread crumbs or whatever it was and then, I guess, the animal got a little too comfortable.”
Luckily, the girl was alright after what looks to be her father jumped in to rescue her. “My first reaction to the video is just how stupid some people can be to not treat wildlife with proper respect,” said Andrew Trites, the director of UBC’s Marine Mammal Research Unit. “This was a male California sea lion. They are huge animals. They are not circus performers. They’re not trained to be next to people.”
