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HORSE ABUSE...I have a very hard time watching many westerns on DVD these days. (3 Viewers)

Mike Broadman

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Sorry for my off-topic ramblings. To steer this thread back on topic...

Of course, if watching older movies where horses are hurt bothers you, don't watch. But do you know which scenes in which movies this actually happened? Or is it just the fact that they're in the movie that bothers some people?
 

Dick

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Well, since I originated what has become a fairly controversial thread, I'll step back in for a moment. I realize animals are no longer (ostensibly) mistreated on film sets. That was not my point. My point was that my developing conscience over the years has made viewing some older films, among which are some favorites, difficult because I know many of the animals I see being toppled for the sake of entertainment had to be killed due to injuries sustained on movie sets. This was merely an observation. But human nature is a mass of contradictions. As a species we have achieved so much and can be so compassionate, yet we've wiped out millions of Jews, Native Americans, Serbs, etc. in the name of Manifest Destiny or racial superiority.
We say we love our children and our animals and environment, yet we abuse them all just so we can sustain our materialistic way of life. Had PETA or ASPCA or other animals rights advocates not stepped in, we'd be gleefully using trip wires to kill horses to this very day.
 

Mary M S

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I have horses, they are cutting horses and they have a job to do, I do it for the sheer joy of being around them.
I’ve loved horses all my life. I view horses with the sappiest worst kind of romanticism but I understand cold hard reality. I cannot stand to see them suffer or be abused, one of the hardest incidents I’ve ever personally experienced was when I was 16 and watched a colicing horse die which in its agony had rolled and tangled into a barbwire fence. I was surrounded by younger children and sent the other 16 yr. old for adult help and a vet. We did what we could trying to cut it out, but the situation was deadly to us, (thrashing) and the poor horse only tightened the wire by its movements when we came close.
The romantic wanted to flee, (everyone else did for the last 30 min.) the cold hard part of me stayed, if it was doomed to suffer, I was doomed not to allow it to suffer alone. If I had had access to a gun, I gaurentee I would have been capable of shooting it.
Being around horses have accounted for some of my worst and best moments in life, I would not trade these experiences even though it came peppered with its fair share of hard moments. I think higher of many horses I know than their human counterparts.
What I see in the industry is a gradual decline in world horse population. The romantic in me would cover the earth with ‘black stallions’ running free. The reality is, with out specific purpose, uses, monetary reasons to bred and manintain herds like the movies, horse numbers will only continue to dwindle. Squeezed like so many other species until relegated to zoo only view.


Watching oldies has also become harder for me. The longer I live, I become more sensitive to seeing pain or decadence (use of horses for human entertainment) in any shape or form. I am for all kinds of regulation to protect and monitor their use in the film industry.
But as it is important to me to sustain numbers around the world at the highest possible level and increasingly horses are now relegated to boutique type industries. I will support these last bastions which help to maintain their numbers as long as possible.
 

Jack Briggs

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Dick and Mary both touch on a related issue: watching films in general from the less-enlightened eras that delved into areas no one would touch today.

I remember an old Bob Hope movie (just him and his African-American manservant--not a Crosby "Road To" pairing). The racist jokes, which doubtless illicited laughs in 1946, would earn groans (I hope) today. At one time, Hope--whom I never have liked--referred to his manservant as having been born during an eclipse.

Look at the old Johnny Weismueller Tarzan movies. Racism and animal torture/cruelty are pandemic in those things. As a result, I can't really watch those movies today.

I don't expect everyone--or even a significant fraction of the population--to share my views about nonhuman animal life. Yet, in my youth, I was comparitively callous and uncaring. Certain personal events which I won't delve into here brought about a change in my outlook.

Last Sunday evening, after a buddy and I spent the afternoon watching the Dodgers/Red Sox contest at Dodger Stadium, we headed over to dinner at this lovely couple's house. Well off, these cool people--he an Amerrrcin, she from Guyana--are what would seem to those of you in the other forty-nine typical "California types."

Their backyard is almost like a small nature preserve--gardens, ponds with running water, birds and insects hanging out, the works. Before and after dinner, I helped with pruning some of the plants. Greg would marvel over the insect life colonizing the trees and other foliage, going on at length about their habits and such.

At one point, while lounging next to the hot tub (yep, California), I was talking excitedly about some topic or another when Tess, Greg's wife, cautioned me not to react nervously but that a large beetle had just lighted on my forearm. "Be still, Jack, he's just hanging there until he decides where to go next," she said quietly.

Seconds later, the insect flapped its wings and took off. It was a kind of an epiphany. Respect even for insect life. I liked it.

The curious thing about the entire evening was how peaceful and satisfying it was. I guess you had to have been there. But it made a real impression on me.

It was with all that in mind that I first scrolled through this thread. I am telling you this simply for background.

I won't advocate vegetarianism, since I have been unsuccessful so far in previous attempts. But I applaud those who make the lifestyle work for themselves.

To each his own--but cruelty to nonhumans is never cool. I'm not saying something so silly as to love your nearest cockroach or housefly. But I try to be as relenting as possible. That's all.

I'm glad some others here at least lean that way.

(BTW, still pleased with how calm this thread has remained. Thanks, all!)
 

Mary M S

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Oh Jack,
You hit my note. I have never understood the "nuisance effect" attitude.
I wish I had your Friends for my next door neighbor. Mine spends all her time, dumping pounds and pounds of chemical based fertilizers, weed killers, bug killers, Industrial tanks hired to spray her trees. (My yard looks better, the natural way, drives her nuts, she can't buy it in an industrial can)
I on the other hand spend all my time coaxing frogs to come and live in my vicinity, chasing my cat around the yard to save a chameleon or a green yard snake, (I win a few - I lose a few).
My most peaceful blood pressure reducing moments are spent just observing, what flys, crawls, hops around.
Recently I was in a Hammock when a dragonfly landed 2 inches from my eyes as he paused to munch a mosquito. I never knew that up that close Dragonfly's have the silliest wisest turtle looking heads.

I wanted to haul my Father in Laws neighbor off herself, for calling and harassing local animal control in their neighbor to "remove the wild turkeys because they were so large they might be dangerous". (Can't count how many people I've know who have been pecked to death by wild turkeys) This is a beautiful lake resort gated subdivision where a few green-belts exist with that kind of nature roaming around. To me what a privilege, to her..... She doesn't know about the local bobcats yet, I shudder to think.
 

John Stone

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The analogy of treating animals the way we would want super powerful aliens to treat us is flawed. Animals do not have the same, if any, understanding of free will, intellectual freedom, etc like humans do. They don't have careers and political objectives. They basically operate on survival and breeding instinct.
I don't believe that my questions and comments (none of which were analogies, BTW), are flawed. I understand that it may difficult to see the logic, but I believe that is because our thinking is so human-centric. :)
Consider an intelligent race of beings that thinks on a level completely beyond anything our silly mammalian brains are even capable of imagining. What if, by comparison, our "intelligence", politics, social customs, careers--everything we know--are as meaningless and primitive to them as are a cockroach's instincts to us? Our planet is so very tiny, and yet the Universe is massive beyond our reason. In the grand scheme of things, we may be far closer to the cockroach than we think. I don't want to be sprayed with posion or smashed just because I'm stupid. So yes, if I see a roach in my house I catch the little sucker and put him the garden. I find that it always feels better to spare a life than to take one. :)
For those smiling at the unintended reference, I held these beliefs long before I saw MiB. :)
I apologize for straying so far from the original subject of this thread.
 

Chris Lock

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> I don't want to be sprayed with posion or smashed just because I'm stupid.

Yeah, but would you move your family into the super-being's home & start breeding out of control, eating your host's food, spreading disease, & crapping all over the place? That's what bugs do, which is why the ones I find inside don't live long. I've tried asking them to leave, but they don't seem to understand.
 

John Stone

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Yeah, but would you move your family into the super-being's home & start breeding out of control, eating your host's food, spreading disease, & crapping all over the place? That's what bugs do, which is why the ones I find inside don't live long. I've tried asking them to leave, but they don't seem to understand.
Well, you really seemed to have missed my point, but I'll humor you. The cockroach was on earth long before humans. What you are saying is that we have the right to do what we want to them since we are more intelligent, even though they were here first. What if the aforementioned race of beings decide to make Earth their home, and from their point of view we are nothing more than primitive, disgusting disease-spreading animals? By your logic, we all deserve to die for invading their home (which, of course, they rightfully can take from us by virtue of their intelligence).
 

Julie K

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Animal interaction was monitored by theAmerican Humane Association with on set supervision by the Toronto Humane Society. No animal was harmed in the making of this film. Human interaction was monitored by the Inter Planetary Psychiatric Association. The body count was high, the casualties are heavy.
 

Zen Butler

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It's common knowledge (by a few forum member/friends)that I'm vegetarian, and some may know my affiliation with certain groups. That's why I will abstain from most of the topic.
but..
To each his own--but cruelty to nonhumans is never cool.
light and flimsy at best, but so true, in a Gil Scott Heron sort of delivery
 

John Stone

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What about termites? Hard to get them to move.
That's a really good question. If my home were invaded by termites (or massive amounts of roaches, or anything else that threatened it, or the people who live in it) I would take whatever action I needed to, including killing the invaders, to protect my home and its occupants. That's survival, and I believe nothing should ever have to apologize for trying to survive. That doesn't stop me from trying to prevent that sort of thing as much as possible.
 

Mary M S

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That's survival.
(and That is the unrelenting bottom line.)
Okay all bug lovers AND squashers, would that be one of the off topic POINTs of the day.

If horses eat hay, alfalfa being the primary carrier, infected with even tiny body parts of ‘Blister Beetle’ it is an extremely painful death, the survival rate is low. A famous cutting horse who won the equivalent of the triple crown in cutting and went on to become a million dollar syndicate, almost died 2 months before the Futurity, (his stable mate was not so lucky).
Farmers and ranchers spend time and effort to eradicate this danger.

There are unforgiving inflexible laws governing the food chain which dictate survival of any living thing. It seems to me when humans swing to either extreme whether it is PETRA or Slash & Burn Timber harvesters, is when our world becomes chaotic and dangerous.
We ignore nature’s laws (if you will) at our own peril. Cows were never intended to be forced into cannibalism and a terrible consequence was paid for that greed. Lions where never intended to eat anything other their staple diet and no amount of human politicking will convince them to Lay down with the Lamb. (Maybe a gazelle now and then).
There is order to this universe no matter how distasteful some of it might be.
You couldn’t let mice run merrily around your property if you knew they carried the black plague.

Nature is cruel and beautiful, I stop my cat from eating a what-ever if I’m available, and I’d stop a dog from eating my cat but…
I was told a woman jumped out and chased a hawk off a field rabbit it had just killed. The rabbit was dead and she knew it but she just couldn’t stand the food chain played out before her eyes, so she cried and buried the rabbit so the Hawk would not desecrate its corpse. I guess it did not occur to her when she interfered in that situation, what a waste for the hawk, who’s ratio of hunting success’s can be as slim as a Cheetahs kill rate. And I’m sure the woman would have cried just as hard over the bodies of precious fluffy chicks when they died of starvation after a hard hunting season.

I save baby birds all the time, (from domestic cats who won’t starve to death without them) but I won’t interfere when an omnivorous Crow takes one to feed its own young. Humans need to tread as light as possible living and let live, each within our own circles of basic survival boundaries.
 

TimDoss

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"It's not often we recieve visitors here,let alone offer them hospitality"
"HORSE BRUTALITY???"
 

Jack Briggs

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The thread remains civil, polite, and calm. Thank you for allowing diverse viewpoints to be heard without resorting to invective. This makes me smile. Again, thanks.
 

Henry Carmona

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Jack,
Thats a great story and i would have also let that beatle fly off.
But i wonder what your friends would have said if i smacked a mosquito trying to bit me :D
You dont need to watch movies for animal cruelty, just go to a circus.
 

Chris Lock

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> The cockroach was on earth long before humans.
So were the dinosaurs, but I don't want any of those in my house, either. What does amount of time on earth have to do with anything?
I'd comment on how silly it is to compare real life with some hypothetical super aliens, but it's time to go eat some meat. Since some of you don't participate, the rest of us have to eat twice as many animals to keep the natural balance of things. No need to thank us, though. We enjoy it. :)
 

David King

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Since some of you don't participate, the rest of us have to eat twice as many animals to keep the natural balance of things
I agree. I tend not to eat poor innocent plants to make up for those who eat only that. :)
I didn't know people felt like this regarding insects, I sure hope some of you guys don't get Fear Factor canceled, thats one of my favorite shows.
PS (aka on topic), horse flipping is no longer allowed in movies, as explained and properly done in Braveheart.
 

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