Since June 2009, I have written regular online essays for Psychology Today. When I agreed to do this, one of my main goals was to become something of a media watchdog concerning how nonhuman animals are portrayed in the media and popular culture. To me, this is a hugely important issue. Animals in the media are often treated as mere objects; they are sensationalized, and they are misleadingly “humanified” to suit our own ends or beliefs. We should expect, and insist, that animals in the media be represented accurately as the beings they are, not as who we want or imagine them to be. Accurate reporting is part of the process of rewilding, as is becoming self-aware of how images of animals, and even the language we use, both reflect and influence how we feel about other animals — and thus how we treat them.
The media are an extremely powerful influence, and the messages they convey make a tangible difference in the actions we take. For instance, one study has shown that accurate information about climate change is “the best predictor of an intention to do something about it.” Furthermore, the study’s authors note that emotion is a very important predictor of sustainable behavior. The same surely holds true in our interactions with other animals. Eleonora Gullone (in her 2012 book Animal Cruelty, Antisocial Behavior, and Aggression) argues that the media’s increased attention to animal cruelty has led to an increased acceptance of the link between human antisocial behavior and animal abuse.
By looking at the media, we clearly see the “human dimension” in our relationships with nature and nonhuman animals. Movies and documentaries, the bias in our language and news reports — all these things reflect how we understand the world and what we believe. Many times, pop culture myths and sensationalism can influence us strongly without our even realizing it. As we rewild our hearts, we have to take personal responsibility for these issues. We have to examine our beliefs and the way we talk, and we should question media portrayals and not take them at face value. Far too often, they are misleading, sometimes dangerously so. Often this is because “sensationalism sells,” experts on both sides of an issue haven’t been consulted, or the issues at hand are too complex to be handled in a short radio or TV report.
The question of how to accurately portray animals is not new. As Ralph Lutts, in his outstanding book The Nature Fakers, notes, in many ways the science versus sentiment debates that arose in the early 1900s still influence our thinking. Around the turn of the twentieth century, nature writing became extremely popular, as were questions about the nature of animal minds, whether nature was “red in tooth and claw” or more peaceful, and whether more subjective, individualized portraits of other animals were accurate and scientific. Teddy Roosevelt and John Burroughs attacked many popular nature writers, including Ernest Thompson Seton, Jack London, and William J. Long, as “sham naturalists” who sentimentalized and misrepresented animals in popular media. This bias to treat animals as interchangeable objects, rather than individual subjects, persists today. And I am happy that Rupert Sheldrake and I were responsible for having Long’s book How Animals Talk reprinted in 2005, as it is an outstanding work on animal behavior and animal minds. I often wish I lived back then and had been Long’s student, accompanying him and others on their forays into nature.
In contrast to dismissively objectifying animals, the media also frequently sensationalize animals in overly dramatic, fear-inducing ways. Because “blood sells,” stories of violence are often exaggerated to get attention, which leads an unknowing public to fear the “predators at our doorstep” (as I mention in chapter 3). Perhaps sensationalism will always occur, especially in movies, since moving people emotionally is how studios sell tickets and how news organizations get people to click on websites and view pages. But we can still learn to recognize and question inaccurate portrayals when we see them.
However, I’ve also learned a few things by joining the popular media through my Psychology Today column: First, judging by the reactions to my columns, people feel passionately about animals and about the complex and paradoxical nature of the human-animal bond. Further, the interactivity of the Internet means that people no longer must passively accept whatever they read. They can respond to authors and the media directly, and they do — sometimes only to shout, but more often readers want to thoughtfully engage the ideas and proposals. And last, people hold an incredibly diverse range of opinions, and the exchanges I have witnessed and been part of about human attitudes, beliefs, and values regarding nature have been eye-opening and invigorating. Even when I do not always agree with someone’s perspective, I always learn from these exchanges, and I hope my readers feel the same way.
The words we use to refer to animals strongly influence how we view them and the actions we take to protect them. They can also be very revealing, particularly the pronouns we use. With our companion animals, people typically use gender-specific references: their dog is “he” or “she,” not “it.” This is because we feel close to our dog or cat, and our language honors the animal’s subjectivity and reflects our emotional connection.
But words can also be distancing mechanisms. When it comes to the animals humans eat for food, we often use impersonal language, as if to avoid presenting the animals as thinking, feeling subjects. An animal will be referred to as “it” and “that” rather than as “he” or “she” or “who.” As Georgia State University’s Carrie Packwood Freeman points out in her essay “This Little Piggy Went to Press,” a cow on a plate is called meat or a hamburger, and a pig is called bacon, sausage, or ham. In other words, people will ask for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, but does anyone ever order a Babe, lettuce, and tomato sandwich?
So, we need to be careful and self-aware about the words we use to refer to other animals. When I talk about the food people choose to eat, I point out that very often it’s a matter of who’s for dinner, not what’s for dinner, because the animals who wind up on our dinner plates were once alive and sentient. They are not objects, and our words should not objectify them. This small change in words has resulted in a number of people deciding to change to vegetarian or vegan diets. In June 2012, I received a most heartwarming email from a woman in Vienna, Austria, who had heard me speak, and she said, “You’d turned at least four people to vegetarians — including myself.”
In the end, perhaps one of the simplest and easiest ways to rewild our hearts is to rewild our language.
Perhaps it should be obvious, but I often find it isn’t: Movies aren’t real, and more often than not, movies do not portray animals accurately. Talking dogs? Singing warthogs? These characters are obviously human stand-ins. They are not to be taken seriously. Walt Disney, of course, was a master at anthropomorphizing animals and using them to re-create fairy tales or to embody human myths about the wild. And yet, as much as we might understand that an animated fantasy isn’t realistic, these movies can have an enormous influence in how real animals are perceived. A few excellent books about this include Reel Nature by Gregg Mitman, Animals in Film by Jonathan Burt, and Shooting in the Wild by Chris Palmer. In short, entertainment has direct consequences for animals.
Live-action movies, ones that use live animals and are set in the real world, are perhaps the most insidious, since it’s easier to forget that what we are seeing is a human projection. But animation influences us as well. In movies, animals are often portrayed according to their cultural stereotype, which only reinforces those stereotypes, even if these ideas bear no relation to the actual animals. Are lions noble and hyenas venal? Are mice cute and loving and rats dirty thieves? Are snakes and sharks evil, mongooses brave, chickens stupid, and foxes clever? Folk tales and movies lead us to think so.
Hollywood and TV have a widespread effect on how animals are perceived, and for the most part, they don’t care whether animals are presented realistically. They only care about creating drama, and animals are often staged and their behavior manipulated to fulfill a story’s needs. For instance, the 2011 movie The Grey presented a pack of violent rogue wolves who attack the film’s human protagonists. In a way, this was only a hyper-violent retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood,” one that played off of the negative myths of grey wolves as vicious, human-hunting predators. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been only two fatal wolf attacks on humans documented in North America. If The Grey were a documentary, it would be guilty of fear-mongering sensationalism. As a movie, it can shrug this off and freely make wolves the villain. Hey, it’s just fantasy, right? Yet it is also a pack of lies. It rivals Jaws in its misconceptions about wildlife.
A movie like The Grey feeds our fears about the real animal. Despite objections by scientists, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has put forth a proposal to remove grey wolves from the list of threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, so that they would no longer be protected, and in some places wolves are wantonly killed by ranchers to protect their livestock (see chapter 3). If we believe (contrary to what is known) that wolves mean to do us harm and will kill humans if given the chance, then killing wolves becomes a justifiable form of “self-defense,” and the idea of coexistence with these magnificent, social mammals seems foolish and unrealistic. A movie like The Grey provides the perfect motivation and rationale for “getting rid of” wolves, rather than protecting them.
This is only one example among many, but it embodies a particularly cruel irony. As we know, long ago, the dog evolved from the wolf, and today we consider the dog “man’s best friend.” But wolves must have been our “best friend” first, or else some wouldn’t have domesticated into human-loving dogs in the first place. That original affinity between wolf and human — that enduring friendly cooperative impulse that led to the first instance of domestication we know about — remains, and it’s a story the movies rarely tell.
Of course, films sometimes do “get it right,” and the power of storytelling can be used to aide rewilding. I remember a great moment in the 2010 movie The Switch, in which Sebastian, a young kid, refuses to eat duck at dinner and won’t blow out candles on his birthday cake until someone offers to adopt a three-legged dog at a kill shelter. Sebastian also comments that we move too rapidly and that’s why we are called the human race! I was thrilled to see this scene, which perfectly mixes humor with a serious message: that there are far too many unwanted dogs. If they chose to, people making movies could go a long way to encourage their audience to reflect positively and proactively on our interactions with other animals.
Movies can also mislead us in a more deliberately self-serving way. The incredibly talented and highly trained animal actors who befriend humans, save the day, or otherwise play roles in the drama are sometimes horribly abused, despite claims by movie studios to the contrary. Indeed, there is solid evidence that animal training for entertainment really involves “breaking” the animal to get them to do what’s needed, whether they are performing in circuses, zoos, or films. A recent example concerns Tai, the female elephant star in the 2011 movie Water for Elephants. Tai became an “emotional wreck” because of the abuse to which she was subjected in the making of this movie.
Another example is the 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. While no animals were harmed during the actual filming itself, according the American Humane Association, it turns out that perhaps twenty-seven animals were killed, and more injured, where they were being housed. The list of maimed or killed animals included five horses, a pony, several goats, sheep, and chickens, and a studio spokesperson for the film admitted, “The deaths of two horses were avoidable.” Animals fell into sinkholes, were injured by wire fencing, and were harmed or killed by other animals in the overcrowded conditions.
While animal abuse during filmmaking is sometimes deliberate, more often it is not the intention of the people using the animals. Yet it occurs all too easily. In itself, a movie set can be unsettling to an animal. They do not like the bright lights and noise of a typical set. Even when their basic needs are taken care of, most would no doubt prefer to be left alone.
One potential solution to this problem is exemplified by the incredibly popular movies Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Avatar, and Noah. Only computer-generated nonhuman animals were shown in these films, and these movies are great examples of how it’s now possible not to use any real animals to make films. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is particularly stunning in this regard, for Caesar, the main animal character (played by Andy Serkis), looks and acts like a real chimpanzee. It’s wonderful that not a single chimpanzee had to be used to show viewers what it’s like to be a chimpanzee. Caesar’s emotional states are beautifully portrayed, and at times I caught myself wondering what this chimpanzee must have felt about being used in a movie this way, only to remind myself that Caesar wasn’t a real chimpanzee. While we should continue to do more to protect animals in entertainment, this movie can be a model for ending the use of animals in film.
One place where we expect accurate portrayals of animals is in nature documentaries and nature photography. After all, that’s what they are selling: real life and authentic science. But nature shows can sometimes be no more realistic than reality TV programs like The Bachelor.
At their worst, nature documentaries amount to “nature porn.” They concentrate on attention-getting sex and violence, showing animals mating, being aggressive, and in acts of predation. The details may be correct, but the impression radically misrepresents animal lives and feeds the false notion that nature is a competitive, brutal game of “survival of the fittest.” In fact, wild animals spend much of the time resting and being nice to one another, playing, sharing food, and cooperatively defending food and territory. Indeed, for all species that have been studied, more than 90 percent of their time is spent performing in positive and friendly ways, or what are called prosocial behaviors. Conversely, nature programs will get laughs by showing animals making mistakes and falling down, but animals are not as daffy as they are sometimes made out to be.
Many professionals are also concerned with the accuracy of nature photography. Sometimes, these shots are staged at game farms, where individual wild animals spend most of their lives in tiny, filthy cages, with no regulations governing how they are housed. The “perfect” photos are then sold at a high price to an unaware public, who do not realize they’re actually buying an illusion of a wild animal. This raises many ethical questions, since these animals are essentially “paroled and paraded for profit,” according to world-renowned “Images of Nature” wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen (who kindly provided the photo on the cover of this book). Mangelsen notes:
Not only am I concerned about the welfare and exploitation of the animals, but also about the continuing loss of credibility and integrity to the wildlife photography profession once people learn that many of the photographs they have admired are of animals that spend their lives in cages. I have heard all the rationales for photographing at Game Farms. I find most of the justifications hard to accept and feel most are self-serving and generally don’t really consider the welfare or the best interest of the animal or for that matter what’s best for the profession of wildlife photography.
Of course, this does not mean that all documentaries and photographs of animals are misleadingly false. But it does mean that we shouldn’t take every claim of authenticity at face value, and we should remember that entertainment is meant, first and foremost, to be entertaining. Just like reality TV, events can be manipulated to enhance the drama.
There are excellent organizations teaching and encouraging responsible filmmaking, like the Center for Environmental Filmmaking in Washington, DC, as well as an increasing number of moving films that “show it like it is.” These include the 2013 documentaries Blackfish and The Ghosts in Our Machine. Black-fish documents the wanton and continued abuse of killer whales (orcas) in captivity, focusing on the life of Tilikum, a male who killed two people and was used as a “breeding machine” while in captivity, his latest home being SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. This film was very influential: It resulted in schools canceling class trips to visit SeaWorld, and it spread the word that killer whales (and other aquatic animals) really are driven crazy by swimming in circles and that they are often abused while being trained to perform stupid and unnatural tricks solely to entertain humans and make lots of money.
The Ghosts in Our Machine, directed by Liz Marshall, is an incredible and forward-looking film. It follows internationally renowned photographer Jo-Anne McArthur over the course of a year as she documents the stories of individual nonhuman animals who are caught in the web of so-called “civilized society” in the United States, Canada, and Europe. She looks at just those sentient beings whose sentience has been rendered invisible to us, and so they are the “ghosts” in our societal engine. In a promotional clip for her film, McArthur says she feels like a “war photographer” because we really are waging war against these animals as we wantonly exploit them in myriad ways. This is the kind of film that can rewild our hearts by waking us up to the ways we alienate ourselves from the nonhuman animals in our lives. It also stresses that animals are not ghosts — invisible objects — but rather sentient beings who care very much what happens to them. Spend five minutes with Jo-Anne and you can feel the passion that drives her stellar work.
People always ask me if I’ve seen or read this or that news article or book about the lives of nonhuman animals, and I often feel a need to correct what I find. The news media often take liberal license to stretch the facts or to simply misrepresent other animals. One of my colleagues, a bestselling author, once told me that it is okay for him to take liberty with facts because he is not a scientist. I bristled and refused to write endorsements for his books.
This is an unacceptable attitude. The long-established ethics of journalism shouldn’t be suspended for animals. Clearly, news media leave an enormous footprint in the human cultural landscape, and there are hidden costs and collateral damage when animals are misrepresented, disparaged, and objectified. Journalists “script” nature to fit the different formats of magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, but rewilding demands accuracy in reporting. News media play an important role as we rewild, for the vast majority of people rely on media to learn about the fascinating lives of other animals as well as about the damage we cause to them and our planet.
One issue is that news reporters, particularly on TV and radio, often present animal stories in entertaining ways that make light of animal suffering. For instance, in October 2012, a video of chimpanzees tormenting and tossing around a raccoon at the St. Louis Zoo was shown on a local CBS affiliate and treated as a source of humor. After one news anchor laughs about the “monkey business” in the clip, both anchors giggle while the tormented raccoon tries desperately to escape from the chimpanzees, who keep grabbing at the raccoon until he or she disappears in a drain pipe. Still laughing, one anchor ends the segment by saying, “I’ve wanted to do that to some of the raccoons in my backyard.”
I have a good sense of humor, but there was nothing funny in the chimpanzees’ behavior or the raccoon’s stress. If it had gone on longer, the chimps’ excitement could easily have escalated into a full-blown and deadly attack. Most of all, though, the anchors acted cavalierly and indifferently. If the raccoon were a dog or a cat, my guess is that the anchors would have exhibited heartfelt concern, although raccoons are no less sentient than dogs or other mammals.
Broadcasters have a high profile, and they should try to be clear, positive examples of respect, compassion, and empathy for all animals, human and nonhuman. That’s not really asking too much. Fear and suffering should not be fodder for light entertainment and the object of ridicule.
A similar thing happened in a 2009 National Public Radio (NPR) report summarizing a study showing that ants seem to be able to count. An ingenious experiment showed that ants are able to count the steps they take using what are called “pedometer-like” cells in their brain. Fascinating, indeed. Yet part of the experiment entailed cutting off parts of the legs of some ants, and in the NPR report, this was described as a “makeover.” This was, I imagine, a supposedly tongue-in-cheek way to make light of the uncomfortable fact that these insects were mutilated to prove how smart they are. Lopping off an essential body part should be unethical in any research, even on ants, and calling it a “makeover” really upset me, since it encourages listeners to ignore the callousness of this experiment.
Finally, it’s important to remember that, particularly when it comes to issues of animal welfare in our society, we often don’t get the full story. The news media often distort facts or miss them entirely, either because of an inherent indifference to animal issues or because of the influence of powerful business and political interests. In fact, many people working with and for animals are afraid to speak the truth to media or are told not to do so. This adds insult to injury and compounds the problem of the misrepresentation of animals in media. Carter Niemeyer, author of Wolfer, once worked for Wildlife Services as a “hit man,” someone who kills predators that menace domestic wildlife. In a 2011 interview, Niemeyer said, “Without a doubt, wildlife biologists, who are professionally trained, are inhibited from speaking and acting on their knowledge about wildlife management and resource conflict issues, mainly due to politics within their states.” Concerning myths that are thrown around by antiwolf people concerning wolf predation on livestock, Niemeyer said, “I think what’s going on is a clash of cultures. The truth as I see it, is that livestock losses attributed today to wolves and other predators are being exaggerated because of this clash. . . . I never bought into the belief that wolves are wiping out the deer, elk, and moose in the Northern Rockies. Overall, elk are doing great in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and are at or above management objectives.”
I was talking with a friend as I was writing this chapter and told him how I hate seeing animals dressed up as humans. This misrepresents animals, and even when they are presented as “cute,” there are hidden costs. A few weeks before, a Psychology Today cover story entitled “Are You with the Right Mate?” was illustrated by a photo of a woman holding hands with a tuxedowearing male chimpanzee. Other pictures with the article included a dressed chimpanzee riding on the back of a scooter. The chimpanzee had absolutely nothing to do with the topic, and all I can guess is that the great ape represented the difficulties women have finding acceptable male companions. Cute; nothing more than a cheap visual joke.
But it really upset me because chimpanzees are endangered. My friend understood what I meant but felt I must be overreacting. After all, he said, if chimpanzees are being dressed like humans on the cover of Psychology Today, it suggests there are plenty of them to go around, and their endangered status must not be that dire. This, I told him, is exactly the problem. Studies show that misrepresentation in the mass media actually harms their conservation status; if we see a lot of chimpanzees on TV, we believe there must be a lot of them in the wild. Even the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, asked for a company to pull their 2012 Super Bowl commercial showing a chimpanzee because this desensitizes viewers and sends the wrong message that these great apes are not endangered and even make a good pet. They don’t!
One 2011 study by Stephen Ross and his colleagues shows “the public is less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered compared to other great apes, and that this is likely the result of media misportrayals in movies, television, and advertisements.” Their detailed study demonstrated “that those viewing a photograph of a chimpanzee with a human standing nearby were 35.5 percent more likely to consider wild populations to be stable/healthy compared to those seeing the exact same picture without a human. Likewise, the presence of a human in the photograph increases the likelihood that they consider chimpanzees as appealing as a pet. We also found that respondents seeing images in which chimpanzees are shown in typically human settings (such as an office space) were more likely to perceive wild populations as being stable and healthy compared to those seeing chimpanzees in other contexts.”
Another 2011 study by Kara Schroepfer and her colleagues also discovered that the use of chimpanzees in commercials negatively distorts the public perception of chimpanzees regarding their conservation status and that this distortion can hinder conservation efforts. Obviously, these are unintended consequences, but the impacts are real. We need to be aware of the subtle messages we internalize from media and film portrayals of animals. Even positive characterizations can lead to negative impacts for animals if we aren’t careful.
The 2003 animated film Finding Nemo was a huge success, and it was even a caring (if fictional) representation of fish. Yet about five years later, it was reported that clownfish populations had fallen by around 75 percent in some areas because children wanted their own Nemo as a pet.
In short, part of rewilding our hearts is becoming self-aware of our own sometimes unconscious attitudes toward nonhuman animals and nature. We frequently dress the world and animals in our own image, or believe what’s most comfortable, but those beliefs don’t necessarily reflect the reality and circumstances of other animals. We must learn to unmask our hurtful assumptions and to question the media’s inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Of course, it is also important to recognize when media accurately reflects the lives of the other animals with whom we share our planet. For example, we can freely applaud films that use computer-generated images of animals rather than live animal actors, and we can take heart from documentaries and movies that accurately portray wildlife and the plight of captive animals in society. The media leave a huge footprint in our culture, and animals will benefit or suffer depending on how the media handle this responsibility. The best way to assess media is to consider things from nature’s perspective and to honor all beings and their homes.