No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post

Sometime ago, when I met with Jennifer’s teacher, I shared with her my personal email addy. She noticed how this email addy was similar to the movie title, Dances With Wolves. We both love the movie and we both happened to share how difficult it was during the scene when Dances With Wolves' horse, Cisco, was shot. We both cried over that scene. As a kid, another “sad horse scene” had me in tears: When Atreyu’s horse, Artax, drowned in the Swamp of Sadness in The Neverending Story.

I know it’s fiction, but stuff like this has me bawling my eyes out. I love animals and I can’t stand to see stuff like that in a movie.

And, in fact, I can only take so much of it.

Last night,. Jennifer and I were watching the movie Two Brothers. We thought it was going to be one of those “feel good” animal movies about twin tigers separated at birth and reunited after they grew older. But, in actuality, it was a very difficult movie to watch. Lots of cruelty to animals, killing of animals and just a total disrespect for animals in the wild. I kept saying, “Why can’t they leave them alone in the wild? Why can’t they just leave the wild animals alone?”

But, no. Hunters want the elephant tusks for the ivory. The tigers for their skin or to sell them to the circus. Or to kill animals for sport.

We were both in tears halfway through the movie and we could not watch the whole thing. I mean, even a dog was killed in this movie! (Mercifully, they did not show what was left of the dog after the tiger attacked it.)

It made me think of just how some movies depict this type of thing. And how often it happens. This was not the first time we have seen animals being killed in movies, but usually, animals were killed as an act of mercy, like with Old Yeller after he became rabid and a horse that was bitten by a snake. We understand this is just part of reality, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.

That movie definitely overdid it. And if we see too many other movies with animals being killed in them, I’m going to have to start looking for a web site or something that will list warnings of bad things that happen to animals in movies. We know it’s just a movie and it’s fiction, and the animals are not REALLY being killed during the making of that film, but that’s just not something that we like to see in a movie.