“CRUELTY on Film”

I was just reading about the series of Rambo films on Wikipedia, and there was a link in the article that took me to a page about cruelty to animals during film making. The link was there because during the making of Rambo part III (the one in Afghanistan), several horses are brought down using trip wires. How people can justify hurting an animal to make a movie is beyond me, but there you go.

Anyway, the website the link takes you to is pretty interesting. It is on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website and has a timeline of films going back to 1894 of films that either used scenes of animals being hurt or killed, or shot the scenes and then did not use them in the final version. Some pretty graphic stuff, and not easy reading.

The first one is the one that really gets to me. Thomas Edison thought it would be a neat idea to show the power of electricity by electrocuting a circus elephant.

“Electrocuting an Elephant: Once again a product of Thomas Edison’s filmmakers. The movie documents the electrocution of Topsy, an elephant at the Coney Island amusement park who had killed her keeper. Topsy had reportedly been fed a lighted cigarette by the keeper just before she killed him. In the short film, the elephant twitches in pain, its skin starts smoking and then it falls over. The movie was a hit in cinema houses.”

Now, I know that this was a long time ago, but am I wrong to assume that people would watch an elephant being electrocuted to death, be sickened by that and turn away? What sort of people enjoy that sort of thing? And what sort of a person was Edison to do something like that? Puts a dent in his historical standing if you ask me. It’s great he invented so many things, but geez, what a jerk.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/cruelcamera/cruelty.html