Is it Good ‘Luck’ for Horses, Wolves?
The new HBO TV drama series Luck – about people in the horse racing industry – hasn’t brought much good fortune to the horses. So far, two are reportedly dead – one from falling during a race sequence and another killed during a later episode. As PETA has described it:
Two horses died for a couple of hours of television!
And while the new hit movie The Grey, didn’t (as far as we know) involve killing wolves on the actual set, two wolves did lose their lives on the “trap line” of a local hunter who provided dead wolves to the production team. One of these was so that Liam Neeson and his co-actors could eat a wolf for dinner to help them get into their roles.
The trapper who brought a wolf to the actors for dinner
[Director Joe] Carnahan said of the meat, “I knew how bad it was gonna be and I knew what we were facing so we just all went through it together on the day. We all communally ate wolf and it wasn’t appetizing. It was one of those necessary things because I wanted them (actors) to have a sense of the movie we were making. We’re gonna eat wolf and we’re gonna go out in the tundra.”
He also emphasized that none of the cast or crew killed the wolf, saying “Some guy had him in his basement. I don’t know if it was a trap line wolf but it was a wolf that had been up to a misdeed of some sort. They were preying on cattle. We had asked if there was one we could eat and sure enough this guy had one in his freezer for six months which probably didn’t help the taste! The permafrost didn’t help the layer underneath. Maybe we just had bad wolf, I don’t know.” Neeson agreed with the director’s take on the wolf meat, adding “It tastes like chicken but really gamey!”
The wolf was up to a misdeed? In fact, the wolf was doing was what wolves do. And if humans want to take over their land and put an invasive species (cattle) on that land … and the wolves do what they naturally do … and then some human (another invasive species) comes along and traps the wolves and kills them … and then the cast of a movie eats the wolf … whose exactly was the misdeed? The wolf?
Killing animals for entertainment – or being involved at one remove from the killing of animals for entertainment – is always wrong, period. No excuses, no justifications.
P.S. Where was the American Humane Association in all this? Did they monitor the action in the making of this movie? Or, as in the case of, for example, Water for Elephants, did they monitor the action on the set itself but steer clear of making any comments on what happened to the animals when they were not literally on the set (as in torturing elephants or eating wolves for dinner)? The only reference I can find to The Grey on the AHA’s website is to a movie of the same name 10 years ago.