I have a hard time getting too worked up over many of the things cited in that article. To wit:
A year later, during the filming of another blockbuster, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 27 animals reportedly perished, including sheep and goats that died from dehydration and exhaustion or from drowning in water-filled gullies, during a hiatus in filming at an unmonitored New Zealand farm where they were being housed and trained.
So… during the off-season some goats and sheep died wandering around a New Zealand farm? Unless the deaths from “dehydration and exhaustion” occurred during film-related training exercises, it’s tough to blame the film for this. Additionally, was this 27 out of 30 livestock animals used for the film, or was it 27 out of some 500 animal “extras”? And were these animals specifically bought and owned for the film and housed at a farm managed by the film, or was it (as I suspect) simply one farm out of dozens where local farmers were given the option of renting out their sheep for a day at $20/hour?
A Husky dog was punched repeatedly in its diaphragm on Disney’s 2006 Antarctic sledding movie Eight Below, starring Paul Walker
That sounds pretty bad, but when you read the report, the trainer was acting to break up a dog fight, and it seems like the trainer was fired for the incident due to an AMA complaint. That would seem to be the system working properly.
a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch.
The chipmunk owner was carrying the critter on his/her shoulder, it jumped or fell off and they (the owner) accidentally stepped on it. This one is actually a valid complaint - apparently they used someone’s pet chipmunk, and the owner was not a professional animal handler. If they had sprung for a professional, the animal would not have been killed, and the AMA should have pushed for that.
In 2003, the AHA chose not to publicly speak of the dozens of dead fish and squid that washed up on shore over four days during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Crewmembers had taken no precautions to protect marine life when they set off special-effects explosions in the ocean, according to the AHA rep on set.
I’m ambivalent on this one: the animals were not under the control of the production, but you’d think that they’d know that setting of explosions might kill random sealife in the area.
And the list goes on: An elderly giraffe died on Sony’s 2011 Zookeeper set
But was it a filming incident that killed it? If the trainers knew it was too old to handle the stress of filming, that’s bad. The line above is false - the giraffe died at his trainer’s site after filming had ended. The giraffe was the same one that we know from the old (pre-CGI) Toy R Us commercials.
dogs suffering from bloat and cancer died during the production of New Regency’s Marmaduke and The Weinstein Co.’s Our Idiot Brother, respectively (an AHA spokesman confirms the dogs had bloat and says the cancer “was not work-related”).
Need a bit more detail here. Did they believe that the animals were healthy before filming began? Once they identified that they were sick, did they pull them from production? The lack of detail seems to paint the production as evil, but answering either of the above questions “yes” would put them fairly on the side of the angels.
In March, a 5-foot-long shark died after being placed in a small inflatable pool during a Kmart commercial shoot in Van Nuys.
That’s probably a valid complaint.
Most of the rest of that article seems pretty valid – charges of being to cozy with the industry that it is supposed to monitor, etc. But the incidents above - obviously supposed to be shocking - seem fairly mild compared to the animal abuses present in early filming eras. And the fact that these incidents were reported by the AMA itself… again, it’s the system working as designed. With hundreds of films and thousands of commercials and videos per year, there WILL BE incidents of horses dying or chipmunks being squashed. 100% success is an goal to strive for, sure, but failure to achieve 100% it is not a reason to condemn the process.
