TV's Irwin flees media scrum after croc-pit baby drama

The Crocodile Hunter became the hunted today when Steve Irwin, the Australian TV wildlife host went into hiding after sparking a frenzy by hand-feeding a crocodile while holding his month-old son.

Child welfare advocates said the world-famous celebrity endangered his son in the Friday’s incident, comparing it to when pop star Michael Jackson dangled his baby son out of a Berlin window in 2002.

Police initially said they would investigate whether Irwin violated safety rules, but said yesterday he would not be charged.

Irwin held a news conference on Saturday to vehemently deny placing his son, Robert, in danger, and then went underground. He was refusing to answer any of the calls streaming in from around the world, said spokesman John Harrison of Irwin’s production company.

“Steve’s gathering his thoughts at the moment, he’s not available for comment,” Harrison said today.

The celebrated animal lover, who has survived tussles with pythons and crocodiles, fed a 13-foot croc while cradling Robert during a media event at his reptile park in north-eastern Australia.

“What was Steve thinking?” Australian paper The Sun Herald asked yesterday. A day earlier The Australian newspaper called it “a bizarre act at his Sunshine Coast zoo that mirrored Michael Jackson’s dangling of his newborn over a balcony”.

But Irwin angrily rejected any comparisons to Jackson.

“I would never, ever put him in any danger, not in a million years,” Irwin told Australia’s Sunday Telegraph.

“To hear people say that it was a publicity stunt, that I’m just like Michael Jackson, well, it just tears me up. It makes me sick to my stomach to be compared in that way.”

Jackson, heavily criticised for the Berlin incident, is now facing child sex abuse charges in California.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that after the crocodile feeding, Irwin and his American wife Terri told their five-year-old daughter Bindi to splash around in a pool near a crocodile pen to encourage the reptiles to swim out.

“Now flail around and look helpless, that’s the girl, good girl,” Mrs Irwin was quoted as saying. “That’s my girl, Bindi Irwin, the other white meat.”

A zoo official was quoted by the paper as saying a gate connecting the pool to the crocodile pen was shut at the time.

The Irwins would not comment on the report, Harrison said.