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His name is Bear — but if you’re thinking teddies, you’re wrong. It’s more like giant grizzlies. That’s because he probably knows how to win a fight with one. And he can survive in the wild by eating undigested fruit picked out of bear poo.
Christened Edward, Bear Grylls’ family and friends in the English island of The Isle of Wight fell into calling him “Eddie Bear” — he must have been a really cute kid — and the name stuck. “As a 7-year-old, I thought, ‘Why can’t I have a normal name?’ But it could’ve been worse!” said the host of Man vs Wild, with a laugh.
Yes it could. And he proved it by naming his third son Huckleberry Edward Jocelyne Grylls.
Man vs Wild is a show that sends him into remote parts of the world to demonstrate localised survival techniques.
This third season takes Grylls to Transylvania, Turkey, Belize, the Yukon Peninsula and through the Dominican Republic during hurricane season. And Grylls is the perfect man for the job.
As a member of the Special Air Service of the British Army, he once broke his back in three places in a parachuting accident.
But later at the age of 23, Grylls became the youngest Brit ever to climb Mount Everest.
Since then, he’s circumnavigated the United Kingdom on jet skis, led the first unassisted crossing of the frozen North Atlantic in an inflatable boat, and hosted a dinner party suspended from a hot air balloon. But who’s counting?
Although his show is called Man vs Wild, Grylls doesn’t think man and nature have to be at odds. “There are always times when you feel everything’s out to get you. But to survive well, we need to work with nature. There’s a big cycle of life and nature is so intrinsic. It’s us that mess it up.”
The 34-year-old thinks we should “wean ourselves off dependence on fuel” and he’s “on a mission” to help people see the potential in sustainable energy.
Seeing that his average day involves surviving a frozen lake in the mountains of Oregon, it evidently takes a special kind of person to do what he does. Take encounters with faecal matter, for instance.
“I saw a huge pile of bear poo — bears have really fast digestion — you can just pick the fruit out of it and eat it.” He said this matter-of-factly, but the adventurer/author/motivational speaker isn’t without a sense of humour.
“Sometimes the cameraman looks at me and goes, ‘You’re really not right in the head!’”
That’s because he’s also eaten a 10-inch whip scorpion and the marrow out of some bones of an old carcass. And he’s drunk his own pee. That’s a sharp cameraman.
Catch Man vs Wild, starting Monday night at 10pm on the Discovery Channel (StarHub TV Ch 12). - TODAY/yb
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