When I say taboo, I’m not talking about legal consequences, I’m talking about cultural acceptability. If you injure or kill a human being, the punishment will be much more severe than if you do the same to an animal. Yet, do you ever see explicit cruelty to animals in movies? I think there’s no better judge of a society’s values than its movies, and I can probably count on one hand the number of movies I’ve seen where an animal is shown to be hurt, maimed, tortured or killed.
But the public eats up movies like Saw. We’ve been watching explicit physical brutality, including torture and murder, in films for decades now, and it’s only getting more intense.
Agreed. I’ve heard this is one reason why riot police favor horses (besides the sheer size and strength of the horse); many people who would cheerfully beat up a person won’t raise a hand to a horse.
What people go to see in the movies is not an indication of what type of behavior they find acceptable in real life.
I think there is no better judge of a society’s values than what people actually do. When we see people walking the kids around with choke collars at the end of a leash, or routinely treating others the way farm animals are treated every day, then I’ll accept the OP’s premise.
I think one of the things people in this culture take into account when judging the severity of an action is the capability of the victim. So cruelty against an animal or a child or an elderly person or a physically or mentally disabled person is seen as more heinous, because they have less ability to defend themselves.
I’d have to disagree, it’s cruelty to cute warm fuzzy animals that is more taboo, not animals in general. Rocky training on a side of beef didn’t even raise an eyebrow, but the sight of a dog hanging from the same meathook would freak most westerners out. Remember the youtube video of an American soldier throwing a puppy off a cliff? Cute, fuzzy, helpless = outrage. Soldiers short on food being forced to slaughter their horses for food? Not so much. Poor little baby calves bred for veal and kept in tiny veal crates? Creeps a lot of people out. Chickens being raised in indoor pens packed so tight its solid wall to wall chickens? Doesn’t creep nearly as many people out.
Leaving aside the issue of human attachment to some animals (dogs) over others (cows) - you’ve brought up a bunch of scattered, non-analogous examples. If there was a video on YouTube of someone throwing a horse off a cliff, I think it would generate as much consternation as the one with the puppy. I don’t know anyone who gives a shit about veal conditions who doesn’t also care about chicken conditions - most people are all-or-nothing when it comes to organic/humane meat, in my experience.
Let’s discuss an example that’s actually relevant. The Butterfly Effect, a totally underrated movie, has one scene where an extremely mean and sadistic kid burns a dog to death. But it’s not shown; it’s only implied. You see him put the dog into a burlap sack, and light it on fire, and then later, you see the sack charred, and the kid whose dog it is looks inside the bag and cries. But you don’t actually see the dog burning to death.
It occurred to me - we have movies where human beings are actually shown burning to death. Screaming, flailing around, etc.
Would we ever have a movie with the same thing happening to a dog? No, we would not. Would we even see it happening to a horse or a cow? I don’t think we would.
I think because a lot of people are cruel to animals only do so for the sake of causing pain, especially to someone that can’t fight back. Because they get a kick out of it. It’s extremely disturbing. It’s not like killing an animal for meat, or fighting in self-defense, or whatever. (Cruelty to kids is the same thing)
That and torturing animals is a major symptom of being a sociopath.
(Doesn’t mean I can’t tell I dead baby and/or a dead kitten joke, of course. But reality is, people like that are fucked up. Individuals who start out with animals often move on to people)
Re: This. Here’s something related:
The cartoonist John Backderf was a childhood friend of Jeffrey Dahmer, the psychopathic serial killer. He wrote an illustrated memoir of his recollections, a few pages of which are available on-line here. In particular, this page and the several illustrate his early depredations on animals.
We saw this in Avatar. Of course, these were alien animals, so maybe it doesn’t count.
And, perhaps a but of a hijack, just a few weeks ago I did a thread (typical for me, almost no responses) about a possible new trend in advertising – eating pets. There are a couple of insurance commercials out there. In one, an alien creature eats a guys dog as he’s walking it. In another, parents eat their daughter’s pet fish to save on food costs. I’m trying to figure out how that would relate to this thread.
I’m with Dissonance. There is a very strong taboo against cruelty to pets; there is also a far lesser taboo on cruelty to livestock, but the latter is very, very easily overturned. Cruelty to livestock is ok if the public doesn’t have to see it, and if it is done clinically, economically instead of by a lone psychopath. We would all feel disturbed if a guy hurt and killed little fuzzy chicks; but we don’t even think twice before eating chicken, even if that meant that for every chicken you eat, a tiny fuzzy male chick has been bred, put on a conveyer belt, prodded, and put on a shredder. For an interesting psychological experiment, I dare you to click that linkif you still want to maintain that you are not cruel to animals, yet love to eat regular chap chicken meat. If you think parts of that video are even funny, that tells you all about your ethics and sense of empathy that you need to know.
One more about industrial egg farming: Life in a Nightmare Egg Farm - YouTube.
They weren’t scattered, you’ll note a dead adult cow is an example of an animal without much emotional attachment, while the much cuter baby calf being bred for veal gets a lot more emotional attachment.
I’d love to see a video of someone throwing a horse off a cliff as well. Then again, Native Americans used to drive buffalo over cliffs to kill them and it didn’t seem to bother them any. And well, back when soldiers actually did kill the horses they had ridden on and bonded with often for many years if there was no other meat to be had. The outrage over the puppy being tossed over the cliff has little to do with it being an animal and everything to do with the fact that it was a cute, helpless little puppy. As to veal vs. chickens, you must know some very odd people. It’s been my experience that a hell of a lot of people who object to the cruelty of veal couldn’t imagine giving up on ever eating chicken again.
Yes, let’s discuss your relevant example. What made the death of the animal so sadistic and cruel? Oh yes, it was a dog. You know, one of those warm fuzzy animals that people bond with.
Yes, the fact that we don’t have fire proof suits made for horses and dogs and have specially trained stunt animals who won’t panic when set on fire and follow acting directions in the knowledge that the suit will keep them safe for long enough to film the scene and they will then be put out by a crew standing by with fire extinguishers proves… something. Oh yeah, that it’s not technically possible to do this without the animal running wild in some random non cued direction and eventually dying when the fire retardant suit hit its limit. Ever see The Ring? Just saw it again the other night; it had horses committing suicide which could be humanely filmed without actually injuring or killing the animals. Kind of like how the people you see burning, screaming and flailing in movies aren’t actually kill or hurt in the process.
Then we better define ‘cruelty’ better. Is killing a healthy animal as quickly and painlessly as possible cruel, in and of itself? Does it matter if it’s a dog or a cow? Does it matter if it’s for food or for a science experiment, or just because you want to do it for some reason?
Quickly and painlessly? Did you miss the part where, due to all of the factory workers being mentally dulled and/or not giving a damn, the chicks ended up caught in the trays and put through a hot washing cycle while still alive? The part where dozens of chicks fell on the floor below the machines to die slow deaths? The undercover footage of the chicken farm where the birds beaks or wings got caught in the wire cages so they couldn’t move, dying slow painful contorted deaths? And that is just the built in error of production accidents. The whole footage of the undercover filming in the chicken farm showed the living hell the other birds were in for their short miserable lives.
You are right; the male chicks that ended up in the grinder were the lucky ones.
Are you going to defend your assumption? I don’t accept that “I think there’s no better judge of a society’s values than its movies”? Where are you getting that from?
People go to movies to experience something. They go for shock value. Cruelty to humans has more shock value, because of its taboo, and so is more marketable. It elicits more emotion, and so is more “theatrical”, for lack of a better word.