Animals + Hollywood = Problematic
Four-minute read
No animals were harmed in the making of this blog post. I wish I could say the same for the countless animal stars of movie productions since the invention of cinema in 1895.
In 1903, Thomas Edison released a short film called ‘Electrocuting an Elephant’. It featured the execution of Topsy - an elephant at Coney Island’s Luna Park that had killed a spectator after one of her trainers tried to feed her a lit cigarette. People were thrilled to pay to see the event live, and the captured footage was circulated widely after the event.
Animals had long been used as dispensable props in magic acts and vaudeville performances, and in the very early days of Hollywood there weren’t many regulations. Filmmakers didn’t want to flaunt it in case it upset the public, but animal welfare was not a priority on set.
I have to start with what I believe to be some of the most widely-abused animals on earth. Horses. They’re flight animals that live in big groups. They’re extremely wary of danger. That’s why their eyes are on the sides of their heads. It’s so they can see any hint of a threat and bolt in the opposite direction as quickly as possible.
That’s how they’ve evolved to behave. But humans have put a stop to that. Literally. There are no wild horses. There are feral domestic horses, sure. But all the wild ones are gone. We got rid of them along the way.
The popularity of westerns was particularly hard on Hollywood horses. The genre reached a boom in the 1940s, and the animals were expected to do a lot for the sake of movie magic. This is an excerpt of a Salon article about animal cruelty in Hollywood -
Directors showed lots of falls. They used pitfalls, or tripwires to make horses fall, and there were also some stunt horses, who would fall at a signal. Trained horses jumped through windows or through flames. They leapt over wagons. They rampaged through saloons. All this was at the regular cost of injury or death.
Horses regularly died on set from preventable accidents. On a 1939 movie called Jesse James, two horses were wearing blinkers with eyes painted on them. Unable to see, they ran off a 75-foot cliff and both died.
I’d love to tell you that filmmakers learned from this and changed their ways forever, but that’s not the case. Even after the invention of the ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this production’ disclaimer. Animals were harmed.
Western Heaven’s Gate had a whole mess of incidents. Chickens died in staged cockfights. A horse was killed in an explosion. More horses were killed or injured in a battle scene. Even more horses were allegedly bled to provide gore for humans to be smeared with. It was also claimed that cows were killed and gutted so their innards could be used in place of human organs. On top of all of that, the film was a total flop. It was all for nothing.
Cannibal Holocaust (yes, that’s a real movie) could be the most famous offender. Animals were killed on purpose as part of the plot, and each death was written in the script. That didn;t stop the director, Ruggero Deodato, fclaiming afterwards they were spontaneous events that just happened on the day. The final nail in the coffin is that he was also found to have done the same thing in the other two films in his cannibal trilogy, as well as claiming freshly-captured live action animal killings to be archival footage.
That was in 1985, and the film would not be made in the same way today. The American Humane Association published a set of guidelines for film and TV in 1988. They’ve been updated as time has gone on. For instance, it used to be a-okay to tranquilise animals on set, but after a medication-related death the rules tightened up.
But animals have suffered and died on even more recent productions. You might have seen them in the cinema or own them on DVD. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll take it from The Guardian -
Documents claimed; a husky dog was repeatedly punched in its diaphragm during filming of 2006 Disney adventure movie Eight Below after getting into a fight with another canine; a chipmunk was killed after being dropped during the production of Sarah Jessica Parker comedy Failure to Launch, which was released the same year; and two horses died on the set of children's film Flicka in 2005.
There was an incident on the set of Life of Pi in 2011. American Humane Association monitor Gina Johnson allegedly texted the following to a colleague -
Last week we almost f*cking killed King in the water tank … This one take with him went really bad and he got lost trying to swim to the side. Damn near drowned … I think this goes without saying but don't mention it to anyone, especially the office! I have downplayed the f*ck out of it.
Incidentally, the owner of King the tiger was charged with five counts of animal cruelty in April 2016 after he was found to be whipping his tigers and other animals.
In case The Hobbit hasn’t already been criticised enough, they also made a mockery of animal welfare laws. 27 animals died during the making of the movie. Horses, goats, chickens and sheep perished because of the hazardous conditions on the farm they were kept at near the filming location.
There’s an even more recent example from 2012. The TV series Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman, managed to kill three horses in a single season. The horse-racing series was cancelled after the third fatality, but it just go show that animals still get hurt and lose their lives so that we can watch a TV show.
Things have definitely improved for animal actors, a term I hate because it suggests the animal chose the showbiz life for themselves. But that’s not at all how it happens, because animals have no concept of movies and they’re under total control of their handlers.
Working on a film or TV show is still very stressful for animals. While listening to the podcast Office Ladies, I was struck by a story they told about using a cat for a scene where it was scripted to fall from the ceiling.
The initial idea was to throw the cat up into the ceiling in one part and have it fall down through another. This is the transcript from the ‘Stress Relief’ episode of Office Ladies -
Angela: But as we started blocking the moments of the scene, the cat wrangler Denise was like, you guys, we can't toss a cat up in the ceiling. You know, we can't toss it up. We can't toss it out. There is no tossing of cats, guys, because - not that it will harm the cat. This isn't a very high distance or anything like that.
Jenna: It won't physically harm them.
Angela: It won't physically harm the cat. And then she used this phrase, Jenna, that was like a scratch on the record player, she said, because it will blow out the cat. And this is clearly a cat wrangler term. It will blow out the cat. We all all of us went, huh? Blow out the cat. And then Greg goes, because Greg's such an inquisitive minded person. He's like, I'm sorry. What does that mean to blow out the cat? And she said it will ruin its career.
Jenna: Now, is that because just the stress of performing that stunt would make it so that the cat wouldn't be able to maybe go to work again, like the cat would be OK physically, but it would be stressful and they couldn't be sure that it would be a trainable cat in the future. That's what I'm hearing.
Angela: Right. Yeah, that's exactly what we all heard, which is the cat will physically be fine, but you might make it so it's afraid and we won't be able to train it.
Animals can get scarred for life in productions, be it physically or mentally. With the emergence of CGI and animatronics, we can only hope that fewer animals will be exposed to the dangers of a working set and risking their lives for a movie that might not even sell tickets.
