I'm not an internet fighter and don't care about up and downvotes, just a person who likes to follow the aww sub and has worked on nature docs in the past.

I don't know if there are others here who are involved with documentaries who want to chime in, but for some background: behind the scenes in a lot of animal documentaries there's a ton of wild animal manipulation and harassment. [I just deleted some specifics, I don't want to bash anyone or make sweeping generalizations but the larger docs I've been part of have all done this to some extent, though the people I worked with always refer back to how truly bad it was in the 1960's-80's and how much better it is now.]

In the big docs there are people whose job it is to get the animals to a certain place for the money shots. Some of the scenes you see are serendipitous, but many are painstakingly staged. A lot of the scenes show animals who have been stressed into the action you're watching. I'd say almost always the running migration scenes, but also some of the fight scenes, certainly eating, sometimes kill scenes. Putting out choice food items is among the more low key stressors, or broadcasting scents or recorded noises, creating a water source, strategically removing trees, or moving logs or temporarily covering exits, entrances to burrows or escape routes. Ironically, by trying to give the impression that you're watching behavior that happens when no human is around to see, tons of human interaction and intervention and manipulation has to happen. That type of documentary I've had any part of definitely stress the animals.

The ones that show a single biologist or conservationist interacting with animals are actually usually a lot tamer. In my experience they don't involve as much manipulation, rearrangement or destruction of the ecosystem, last a shorter amount of time and the ethos of the host carries a lot of weight in how the animals are approached and treated. The justification is that by getting the audience to relate to the animals by watching the host relate to them, the audience will feel more passionate about preserving the wild environment of the animal. Again, like I said above, the irony is that the ones that show a person interacting with an animal are generally less stressful and manipulative (in my experience) than the 'impersonal lens' massive BBC type ones. Even though the single-host touching a wild animal scenario puts the interaction in your face, you're generally seeing the extent of it.

I never worked with Steve Irwin but I have worked with a small American conservationist program and a lot of sweeping, epic types that happen in remote locations and I'd probably peg the animal stress level at a 10/10 for the epic ones and a 4/10 for the conservation ones.