Horses in Film

Content warning: Frequent mentions of animal harm and death - skip this post if you are sensitive to such issues

Where are we at with that 'No Animals Were Harmed' disclaimer that we get at the end of film credits? The welfare of animals is one of the things that most lifts me out of the 'suspension of disbelief' when watching a movie or TV programme, as I'm sure is the case for many of us. Who else ends up quickly doing various mental gymnastics to convince yourself that what you just saw was CGI, or very good training, or some kind of hyper-realistic model? It's usually not a problem for your big blockbuster where an expensive bit of invisible CGI is more easily and slickly incorporated, but I do worry about some of these 'artier' lower budget films that lean more towards realism and authenticity. Yesterday I watched the 2017 film The Rider, directed by Chloe Zhao, and it was abundantly clear on multiple occasions that the horses were not having a particularly good time. But that was less to do with the director's choices and more to do with the world in which the film was set - the ranches and rodeos of South Dakota. I'll come back to The Rider momentarily because its quite a complicated example.

The 'No Animals Were Harmed' disclaimer was first introduced in Hollywood by the American Humane Association after an outcry over a stunt in the 1939 film Jesse James. A stuntman rode a horse off a cliff and the horse subsequently panicked and drowned. The stuntman, of course, was fine. This was but one in a long line of horse-based incidents of the time, thanks largely to the proliferation of the Western, and the movie-going public decided enough was enough. Since then, films that use live animals have to apply to the AHA to get that disclaimer attached to their credits and typically a representative will visit the set to make sure animal care standards are being met. To take a recent example, Alfonso Cuaron's war epic 1917 featured a brief shot of maggots on a corpse and the AHA ensure that those maggots were responsibly sourced and kept in a suitably ambient environment while not being used, and then returned to the source instead of being disposed (the 'source' was a local fishing supply retailer so those maggots were doomed anyway, but still). 

All of which is very lovely, of course, but there are plenty of big films that have been certified as 'Unacceptable' in recent years. Twenty-six animals died during the filming of the first The Hobbit film after being kept in woeful conditions, but that did nothing to prevent its release or its success. That quintessential CGI film The Life of Pi also got into trouble for almost drowning a real tiger, which is particularly ironic given the ostensible spiritual message of that film and the book it was based on. It's almost as if we'll do anything to animals just to ensure they perform their roles as metaphors for the fragility of human life. Most real animals we see on film are trained for the purpose, particularly horses who are still used for large-scale battle scenes in historical films and for pulling carriages in period dramas. But is this not also a form of 'harming'? Do these horses want to be standing around on a film set all day and then suddenly ridden by a beautiful human before being 'safely' yanked to the ground on a fake no-mans-land? Of course, when we ask what animals actually want, that becomes a very hard question to answer, but I would make a case for it being: 'an open field and no humans' in the case of most.

I have concerns that the word 'harm' has fuzzy boundaries in this context. We still have such little true understanding of the psychology of animals that we can never be quite sure how much 'harm' a training process results in. We're also on dodgy ethical grounds if the harm on a movie set is accidental: such animals never auditioned to be there, nor did they sign waivers in the case of a falling light or a wayward camera. The alternative, of course, is to either make films containing no animals, which doesn't feel like the right route for representing the world around us, or to always use CGI, which is expensive, time-consuming and still looks fake even when it looks almost real. There isn't an easy answer. But it may be time to revisit the question.

My concerns with animals in films run deeper than 'harm', however. I also wonder how our use of animals in narratives informs our wider practices. In The Rider, a particularly important horse called Apollo gets a bad injury on his leg and has to be shot. The injury is fake and the shooting is implied off-screen, so all of that is fine and dandy. But the metaphor is heavy: Apollo's injury reflects a similar activity-halting brain injury of the lead character, Brady, who now wonders if he also needs to be put out of his own misery. It is one of the oldest clichés in the melodrama book: the death of the animal portends the death of the hero. Think of all those thrillers where the dog dies first. Often, the animal's only purpose is to die and I worry about what that means for our wider beliefs in regards to the superiority and ascendency of man over beast.

Interestingly, The Rider itself reflects these concerns. The film is ostensibly a drama, but it is also partially a documentary of sorts as all the actors are non-professionals playing semi-fictionalised versions of themselves. So Brady's dad and sister are his actual dad and sister (the latter of whom is autistic and it is a refreshingly authentic portrayal), and Brady is an actual former rodeo star who actually suffered a brain injury. All of which makes for a very interesting approach to realism, but in amongst all that we're also shown the real world around the characters, including the real rodeos and the real ranches and all their real horses. There are multiple scenes where Brady uses his horse whisperer-style skills to break-in various wild colts, and one particularly distressing moment when a horse makes a violent bid for escape from the trap-cage bit of the rodeo. These are clearly not CGI, but nor are they necessarily 'arranged' for the drama of the film - they are real practices that really take place in this part of the world.

But that makes them no less distressing and no less depressing. What we witness here is the purest example of the human-animal relationship that simultaneously deeply respects and deeply disrespects the creature in question. There is no doubt that these ranchers and riders love their horses, are fascinated by them and care for them. But rodeos, in my opinion, are just as abhorrent as bull fights, greyhound races and fox hunts. These are angry, frightened, damaged horses being trussed up, tortured and placed in danger on a regular basis for human entertainment. And I can't help but wonder just how much our other forms of entertainment enshrine and encourage this way-of-thinking.