This Walrus Scene From Netflix's "Our Planet" Leave Viewers Traumatised

In Episode 2 of Netflix’s new nature documentary series Our Planet, hundreds of walruses walk straight off a cliff to their deaths. The show’s producers told the New York Times, the walruses have to adopt unusual food-hunting patterns as a result of climate change, leading them into states of confusion and extreme danger. Pacific walruses in the Bering Strait are losing their ice habitats.

Sir David Attenborough explained:

Their natural home is out on the sea ice, but the ice has retreated away to the north and this is the closest place to their feeding grounds.

But walruses’ eyesight out of the water is poor, but they can sense the others down below, as they get hungry they need to return to the sea. In their desperation to do so, hundreds fall from heights they should never have scaled.

Producer Sophie Lanfear said:

They teeter on the edge, and they just can’t work out how to get down there. A small group of maybe six or seven would make it down safely, and we’d all celebrate. But the vast majority do not. They basically walk themselves off the cliff. The walruses are used to a soft landing. Their depth perception hasn’t evolved to deal with a cliff situation, nor have they evolved to work out how to get back the way they came. So it’s just tragic. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.