Animal deaths in books and films

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been wondering about this for a while, and this thread in IMHO finally prompted me to post it.

I can watch films, read books, that show violence and murder. I might cringe a bit, or look away, but I still enjoy them. If it’s an animal that’s hurt or dies (particularly a dog)…oh no. It hits much harder, I’ll look away for longer, and instead of just shrugging it off like when a human’s killed (in fiction, I’m not saying I’m pro-murder! :p) it’ll unsettle me. Hell, I watched some clips of the new GTA game, and while I didn’t blink at running over pedestrians (hey, it’s GTA), when they started on the cows I felt a bit uncomfortable.

I don’t want to get into a debate about what human vs. animal lives are worth. I know that this is a common phenomenon, I experience it, my father experiences it, many of my friends experience it. My question is - why?

2

Don’t read Wild Animals I Have Known. You may never recover. :wink:

As to why - I assume it is because animals, particularly dogs or cats, remind many people of their own pets, who are often seen by people as child-like innocents; they trigger a similar, if less intense, emotional response. Having that emotion triggered is uncomfortable.

If you want to see someone experience the same thing, only orders of magnitude moreso, show a new parent a depiction of harm comming to an infant. When I first became a dad, I literally could not watch that.

3

I am exactly the same way.

And you are correct, that this has NOTHING to do with the *worth *of human v. animal lives. It’s much deeper and more subtle than that. The discussion of worth (which we’re NOT going to have), takes place in the realm of the logical/rational. This reaction to animals is in a gut-level place of feelings, fears, and revulsion that is way below the level of words and logical argument.

I have given this a lot of thought and the best thing I can come up with is that the adult, rational, moral, ethical part of me finds cruelty and violence against human beings (especially children) to be abhorrent, wrong, disgusting, etc., and all of those feelings and judgments that have names… that have *words *that can be used to condemn the acts and the intentions behind the acts. IOW my reactions and revulsion take place in a “civilized” part of me.

Violence against animals is something different. My reaction to it (or the anticipation of it) takes place in and actually *evokes *some primeval, pre-verbal, helpless place in me that can only respond with a wordless shriek (like the Munch paintings). My initial reaction to violence against an animal isn’t retaliation or vengeance (which would be logical and “adult”), it’s that I simply want to cease to exist. I just want to disappear from This Place. Not hide or go underground or run, or even die per se. Just let me be obliterated.

I’ve tried to analyze why *this *is. Maybe letting myself feel the horror of gratuitous destruction of pure innocence that can’t even speak is so terrifying that I’d rather cease to exist than feel it. I really don’t know.

Anyway, it has something to do with animals being pre-verbal, non-verbal, and also that the domestic ones are in our care. They look to us for safety, protection, and humane treatment. As for the wild ones, we are guardians of their world, too, even if we don’t interact with them. To betray this implicit trust that we will care for them is… well, there isn’t a word for it. In a world where that is possible, or God forbid, the norm, no one and nothing is safe. That’s what it *feels *like.

I haven’t sorted this out, even though I’ve given decades of thought to it. Frankly, I’ll be afraid to even read the rest of this thread…
ETA: I’m not a parent, but what **Malthus **said is surely true.

4

Wonderfully said, ThelmaLou.

5

My wife has the same sort of reaction, especially about any sort of cruelty to dogs in fiction. If she hears (or even suspects) that there might be that sort of thing in a book or a film, she’ll categorically reject it. It’s her personal ox which she cannot tolerate being gored. Needless to say, we’ve never watched There’s Something About Mary.

6

Ditto this. I also feel like writers and filmmakers do this to yank the emotional chains of the readers/viewers. In the recent series Broadchurch, which was discussed on this board, several people commented on the thoroughly gratuitous incident where a guy pointed a crossbow at a dog. COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY and IMHO put in solely to get people’s blood pressure up. It worked, but probably not in the way the director intended. It made me want to point a crossbow at HIM. :mad:

I can cite many, many instances of this, but then I’d have to remember and think about them and I don’t want to go there. When an author does this, it just makes me FURIOUS! It’s a cheap trick that makes me feel manipulated and used, and it will make me put the book down or walk out of the theater.

I’ve often noticed that if an animal, especially a pet, appears at the beginning of a film, that animal will die before the end of the movie, either horribly if it’s a murder mystery/thriller or poignantly if it’s a drama. [One notable exception is The Brave One with Jodie Foster, where a dog is taken early in the movie by some very bad people, but makes it through the movie unscathed.]

I wish there was a web site to go to to warn me about movies. In fact, I may start a thread here (unless someone else wants to) for the sole purpose of alerting People Like Us who do not want to be surprised/shocked by animal cruelty.

Thanks,** DungBeetle**-- you are one hard-working guy, mythological even, like Sisyphus. Used to watch those little bugs out at my house in the country. Very diligent.

7

Wow, finally someone put what I feel and have never been able to articulate into words. I am very impressed and grateful. Thank you, ThelmaLou.

8

I’m going to go ahead and take a slightly different opinion. I think it’s not that people automatically view an animal death as bad. There are plenty of examples where animals essentially play villains, for example Jaws or Cujo. I don’t think anyone was sad when the shark or Cujo finally get it. It’s all about the setup.

In some cases, the writers do what ThelmaLou mentions and set up the animal as an innocent, similar to a child or baby, and certainly people react strongly. But people react similarly if an actual human dies when the writers have first made the audience emotionally invested in the character. Even then, writers tread carefully, for example in Gladiator where we are invested more in the child’s parent than the child himself. The difference is that writers are more willingly to write an animals death because it is both heartbreaking but more acceptable than a child’s death.

I’m sure someone can come up with good examples of a child dying in a film and it having a large emotional impact on the audience, but I’m drawing a blank for some reason. A child going missing or being kidnapped is much more common, probably because there is the possibility of rescue. A good example here might be Blood Diamond. When the child is kidnapped and killed, we the audience often didn’t get to know the character first to avoid it being too gratuitously emotional.

Note I’m specifically referencing child characters that we are invested in, rather than movies where children die but we, the audience, don’t really “know” them. That can still be very emotional, but less emotional than a character the audience has invested in.

I think most of the movies that really do a job on the audience with regard to tugging emotions with children are ones based on reality, like Schindler’s List or Hotel Rwanda.

9

The thing is, I will read books and see movies/TV shows that have child deaths. I’ll read about child abuse and be sickened and outraged. I will read memoirs of people who have undergone terrible torture as children and I will weep and be deeply affected.

But I WILL NOT read or see anything (if I can help it) where an animal is put through that. It taps into some helpless, vulnerable part of myself that I cannot distance myself from. There is a gut-level visceral (and I cannot emphasize this part enough) a NON-VERBAL or PRE-VERBAL component that I will go to major lengths to protect myself from. This includes shutting people up who want to tell me stories, walking out of movies, walking out of lectures, throwing books across the room, putting up my hands and saying “STOP” to someone who is starting to tell me something.

I cannot bear to hear of animal abuse. And let me make a distinction with animal suffering. Animals die. They kill each other, people hunt them, we eat them (and no, I’m not a vegetarian, and that constitutes hypocrisy/cowardice on my part, because I won’t read about what goes on in slaughterhouses-- and no, you don’t need to tell me). It’s not the suffering in and of itself; it’s the cruelty, the abuse of innocence, the betrayal of trust, the dismissal of the obligation of stewardship and caretaking. But listen to me… I’m getting all highfalutin and intellectual about something that cannot be put into words without removing it from the heart/gut level where this aversion resides.

It’s truly something different from and more than what you’re saying,** theR**.
Thank you, jayrey. :slight_smile:

10

I agree with ThelmaLou- it’s all about how helpless and non-verbal animals are, the fact that, unlike humans, they can’t communicate to you or call you bad names or yak loudly in a restaurant…

The OP mentioned GTA5, which is great because I was playing that game a few weeks ago and during a shootout with a damn cop a plucky dog ran up to my car. I have no problem killing the antelope (or whatever those white four-legged animals are in the hills), or the pigeons (like in GTA4), or any of the humans (especially the cops)- but that damn dog made me stop playing immediately. I was afraid I or the cop would run over it, so I turned off the console and started over.

It made me wonder why they put that lovable dog in the game at all. He’s an emotional liability to me, that’s all there is to it.

Many jurisdictions in this country are starting to press murder and assault charges against those who hurt or kill animals. Just look at Michael Vick.

Another interesting note: recently I looked up how many humans had died on the Sopranos. The number is about 92, but the death list also contained a list of four non-human animals who died on the show. It shows you how modern audiences care more about animals than they used to, and list them as character fatalities; we’ve come a long way since Mario Puzo used a real severed horse’s head in The Godfather.

11

I’ve categorically rejected Game of Thrones because my brother was kind enough to warn me of an animal death in the 1st or 2nd episode. Then he was going to show me the “Red Wedding” episode just so I could see what all the fuss was about and we got about 3 minutes in before he remembered an animal died there, too, and I had to shut it off.

Funny how I was all geared up and ready to watch dozens of people being slaughtered but the idea of an animal being killed freaked me out way too much and that is what made me turn it off.

And since I’m aware of those 2 instances of animals dying in GoT (there are probably more) I now consider it a horrible horrible show in which animals are dying ALL THE TIME! Boo!

Oh and to add more data to this discussion…I often feel that 90% of animals somehow remind me of/look like my dog. Deer, fish, horses, mice, whatever. With their big black sad eyes. And as soon as I think of my dog coming to any harm, all bets are off!

12

To be fair, the reason Puzo wrote that scene was that he knew readers would be extremely distressed and horrified about such savage brutality towards a cherished animal.

And, of course, no actual horse’s heads were severed in the making of the movie version. The filmmakers ordered a horse head as offal from a slaughterhouse, which had plenty of them available.

So no, I don’t think this example illustrates any particular advance in humane attitudes about animal treatment in the past 40 years or so.

13

Meh, I guess, but you’re assuming everyone feels the same way you do. I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, animal deaths can make me a little misty, but it just doesn’t bother me nearly as much as a child or even an adult if the movie has managed to do a good job getting me invested in the character. Maybe that’s actually the answer. Most of the people posting in this thread are doing so because they feel so strongly as you do, but that doesn’t mean it is representative of viewers as a whole.

Just as an example, I didn’t even remember the animal deaths mentioned by ZipperJJ in Game of Thrones when I thought of Bran being pushed out the window, which was much more memorable to me. (Note that I experienced all those events first by reading the book prior to seeing them on the show.)

It also depends a lot on the type of movie. It probably doesn’t make most people overly emotional to see teenagers die in horror films since that is the norm.

14

I’m currently watching a YouTube Let’s Play of GTA5 where the player gleefully shoots cops, runs down rednecks on motorcycles, and beats up old ladies for their cash…and yet, he gets upset every time he accidentally runs over a coyote.

The movie Agent Cody Banks had a deleted scene where the evil, nasty CEO kicked a duck. The scene had to be removed after test audiences were infuriated by it – even though the scene’s only purpose was to establish the character as an evil, nasty CEO. (The director’s commentary points out where the missing scene used to be, as you can still see some feathers floating in midair.)

15

“Meh"?

I’m replying to the OP. I absolutely do not believe everyone feels the same way. I’m explaining why I think I feel this way. How about if we stick to that and not digress onto the merits or logic of this type of extreme, somewhat uncommon sensitivity.

16

It is gratifying to see that others react as I do to the deaths of animals in books and films. My distress over the portrayal of animals’ misfortunes goes back to early childhood. I think I identified myself with the animals, since (like them) I felt that I was powerless in choosing my fate. I think of a song sung by The Carpenters: “Bless the beasts and the children, for in this world they have no voice, they have no choice.”

Like others, I was infuriated by the dog threatened by the crossbow in “Broadchurch.” This was absolutely irrelevant to the plot, and it was a cheap and nasty trick to play on the audience.