I’ve loved animal movies for as long as I can remember.
When I was a kid, I sat on the floor of my grandmother’s lounge room and watched The Adventures of Milo and Otis over and over again – completely perplexed as to how someone taught these animals to act.
How did they know the story? How did they understand where to go? How were they so… professional?
Of course, eventually I realised they weren’t actually acting. They’re animals – they’re just behaving out of instinct in response to the situations they’re placed in.

In the years since, I've consumed movies about animals without giving much thought to their experiences. I watched Air Bud, the entirely plausible story of a dog who's really, really good at basketball. I was completely obsessed with the pig in Babe, so much so that I was genuinely disappointed when I met an actual pig who was kind of... dirty. And not that friendly.
But recently, I joked with a friend about seeing A Dog's Purpose (less because I actually want to see it, and more because a movie has never been more explicitly targeted to my dog-loving sensibilities) and she stopped me. While I had heard the news stories about the treatment of dogs while filming A Dog's Purpose, I had purposely avoided reading them. I don't want to hear about people doing horrible things to a dog. It's disturbing.
But my friend had me stuck. She started describing in detail the sickening history of the treatment of animals on movie sets.
I should have known at the time, but Milo and Otis weren't played by one cat and one dog. They were played by dozens. Upon the release of The Adventures of Milo and Otis, Animal Liberation Queensland founder Jacqui Kent came forward and alleged that more than 20 kittens were killed during filming. She also claimed a person on set had broken a cat's paw to make it look unsteady in a scene, and that one kitten fell off a cliff, while another scene saw producers make a pug fight a bear.
Top Comments
ive had the misfortune of seeing the japanese filmmakers horrible footage that was cut to pieces to make milo and otis. it makes you feel so sick to the stomach the awful things they did to those animals. throwing kittens off the cliff and setting them up with wild bears are just the tip of the iceberg of horrendous cruelty inflicted
If the author is disgusted by how animals are treated in film, she should take a look at how animals are treated in places where the cameras aren't rolling. That hamburger you're eating with colleagues on a Friday night - do you think that the cow wanted to be slaughtered? Do you think that the cow who produced milk for the cheese wanted her baby to be taken away from her hours after it was born? Humans act like we are the only species on the planet that matter.
If the treatment of cats and dogs in movies upsets you, I highly recommend you watch the movie 'Earthlings'. It received no Humane Association tick of approval, because the animals in it ARE harmed in the making of the movie. But that's OK, because they are 'food animals' not 'pet animals' and we don't need to care about their welfare.