For the more worrisome persons in the audience, the sight of this little disclaimer at the end-credits of a fairly violent film or any film that employs animal-actors is a huge relief. But just how much faith should we put in this disclaimer? This post deals with the misuse of disclaimers like these, ill-treatment of animals on set and their general exploitation in the film industry. It also deals with the amount of things we take for granted regarding the film industry.
Most young audiences aren’t exposed to media that contains scenes of violence for three reasons: (i) kids are likely to be horrified by these images, (ii) that they aren’t mature enough to grasp the events that lead up to the violence or its ramifications and (iii) young audiences can find it difficult to discern between fictitious scenes and real life, because they’re still forming an understanding about how video and cinema and acting works. So if you show a child, or a person who isn’t often exposed to motion pictures, a graphic scene of a horse having its throat cut and drenched in blood, both are probably going to believe that the horse has actually suffered physical pain and has died. As we grow up, we learn that the images on the screen are scripted and dramaticised and not real. With fantastic advancements in CGI, scenes of violence can be achieved without a single scratch to the actors (human and non-human) or set. When I was watching A Game of Thrones, I watched it with the adult presumption that everything I saw was play-acting and no one was getting hurt, but then came a scene (as described above, with the horse) that made me start and wonder just how much of it was real.
If you’ve ever sat through the credits and seen the above disclaimer, you tend to assume that the animals involved in the shooting of the film left the sets as unscathed as their human counterparts. On closer inspection, we find that in several cases, the disclaimer has been stuck at the end of a film without actual certification or approval from the institution whose job it is to certify and approve. The American Humane Association (AHA) rates these films as Not Monitored, and films that have failed to maintain their animals’ safety are rated Monitored: Unacceptable. But in order to understand the misuse of this disclaimer, it begs an introduction to the body that first brought animal-cruelty on set to the public eye.
The American Humane Association’s Wikipedia page reads that it is dedicated to the welfare of animals and children since its inception in 1877. Its Film and Television Unit works in tandem with the Screen Actor’s Guild to certify films and programs that have employed animals in a safe, comfortable and humane manner. The AHA also provides for the animal-actors’ needs just as a film crew would provide the cast with refreshments and trailers etc. The well-known disclaimer (that has now been reshaped and made humourous in many films and shows like The Simpsons, Monty Python, Austin Powers and more) was the direct result of a scene in a 1939 movie that ended in tragedy. While filming Jesse James, a scene involved an actor riding a horse off the cliff. The horse broke its back and died. Animal cruelty was, for perhaps the first time, viewed with a critical eye and the AHA’s involvement was a move to eliminate it from the film industry (Hollywood).
We were all floored by the amount of animal actors in Doctor Dolittle, a childhood favourite for many, and the end credits assured us of their safety during the making of the film. There was little on no violence in this film or its sequel, but countless other series and films have had animals placed in some extremely dangerous situations. This is completely different from human-actors, who, to some extent, exercise their choice and make informed decisions when taking on risks while filming. Animal-actors are commanded by their trainers and can’t really exercise free-will of any sort. Only a well trained animal would ever be allowed on set after all. But if the misuse of the AHA disclaimer is anything to go by, we can safely say that in an industry that treats its human resource as commodities, a few dead animals isn’t anything to cry about. There are several reasons that have prompted me to write this post, one of them being the news I heard about what happened to the horses during the filming The Hobbit. I’ve been a huge Lord of the Rings enthusiast and was eagerly awaiting the release of The Hobbit when I read the Mirror news article about the death of 27 horses. This was followed by the Guardian article that said these deaths could easily have been prevented. I was so horrified I didn’t end up watching the movie at all. What was even more unsettling was the AHA claiming no animals were harmed during filming. Hollywood’s use of animals as a replaceable and inexhaustible resource doesn’t seem to have changed very much since 1939. There are more despicable incidents of animal cruelty:
Thomas Edison is shown electrocuting an elephant on film as well. This was a documentary and not a fictitious movie, and that makes it all the more outrageous, a blatant display of animal cruelty, rather than a green-screen cover up. John Ford Coppola’s venerated war-film Apocalypse Now showed an ox being slaughtered. There’s very little ensuring that animals are even kept comfortable until they are required on set, add to this the countless other instances of reel-life being stained with real-life blood, when animals being brought on set, physically abused, shot and butchered all for the sake of the perfect most authentic shot.
In another Oscar-winning picture that used animal-actors, War Horse depicts the agonizing journey of a horse through the war stricken landscape until he is reunited with his master. Happily, the welfare of the animals was not neglected, as Director Steven Spielberg says in this Huffington Post article, adding that the barbed wire coiled around the horse in one scene was “Styrofoam rubber painted silver“. Yet another example is of the 2010 movie True Grit:
Animal Defenders International, seek to prohibit the use of performing animals at all, calling it a poor life for animals that “are deprived of all the social and mental stimulation that they would enjoy in the wild.” The film industry is one of the most exploitative bodies in the world and to drag wild animals into it, as many activists will argue, is cruel. Animal rights activists have always proposed computer-generated animals for the purpose of films, to rule out any possibility whatsoever of harm or injury. Life of Pi is an exemplary movie, in this respect. The existence of the AHA can be traced to noble beginnings but it has served little role in the protection of animals in Hollywood. Aside from blatant cruelty inflicted on purpose on animals, we must also take into account the kind of environment animals are forced or coaxed into. Imagine being cooped up in a cage for hours or days, being shipped across the country and having every natural response drained out of you. Our lifestyle dictates this sort of living for us – moving from one cooped up place to another and abiding by rules we make for ourselves – but for animals, its a whole different ball game. No one will deny that an animal and his trainer cannot have a healthy relationship, but the likelihood of things going out of control with an animal removed from its natural environment (whether that environment is a sprawling zoo or the wild) is something to consider.
This post deals with Hollywood productions alone, but the use of animals in movies is a universal phenomenon and in some countries there may not even be a body like the AHA to offer some sort of buffer against animal cruelty. If real on-set injury to human actors, who know exactly what they’re getting in to can evoke concern among thousands of viewers worldwide, why shouldn’t we care about real injury, and in some cases death, of animals?
The Word Cunt 