Cynthia Chris

If there's a cockroach in my kitchen, I'm going to squash it.

But if I take a thousand cockroaches to a movie set, a thousand cockroaches go home.

And that's someone who is trying to practice animal acting, animals appearing on screen in an ethical fashion, right?

But I do think that we've become much more uncomfortable about seeing things like chimps, big cats, elephants in captivity and in this kind of situation.

Look, the record isn't perfect.

And a number of years ago, The Hollywood Reporter did a big expose about some accidents that had happened on scenes that still got that stamp.

And that should make us wary about what's going on in films where animals, especially so-called exotics, the big cats, the primates, and so on, appear.

On the whole, yes, having observers on the scene who write reports about how the animals were treated is a very, very positive thing.

And on the whole, I think that they've done real good for the industry, but it's an imperfect record.

Well, that became a big concern of mine when I started thinking about this a few years ago for something that I wrote.

And then, you know, again, thinking about this issue recently because of a couple of films that I saw that re-sparked my interest in this question.

You know, something like the Planet of the Apes series.

where the violence gets really grotesque.

Hand-to-hand combat, right?

A virtual crucifixion scene in one of these films, it is really grotesque.

Or something like Gladiator, I think it's Gladiator 2, where there's digital rhinoceroses and other animals that are subjected to incredible violence.

And

No, I think it's numbing.

It's not something that I want to see or that I think is particularly ethical.

These are things that we wouldn't do to a live animal on screen.