"Many animals were harmed in the making of this film"
Don't have the same restrictions in French films I guess. Well, at least now I know how to karate chop rabbits and hens to break their necks/decapitate them.
shareThis film is from 1974. Those restrictions weren't applied to US films then either.
shareFood is food, and. If an animal is killed humanely and the reason is survival of the next species up the food chain - well, that's nature, and there's not much you can do about that. A necessary evil. But allowing this kid to take 3 or 4 shots to take the chicken's head off...that bugged me. I guess I should take a bit of comfort that this wouldn't be allowed to go on in a film today.
"You're a cookie full of arsenic...I'd hate to take a bite of you" - J.J. Hunsecker
Maybe that's how many shots it takes to knock a chicken's head off with your bare hands.
My vote history: http://us.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=9354248
Not sure about the actual rules in 74, but there were also the censors to contend with too I bet. I don't remember too many US films that depicted the harming of animals so graphically (Horse head in the Godfather for instance..just showed the aftermath, not the act).
I didn't have a problem that the characters in the parlance of the story did these things. That's what farmers do. Just witnessing it was (for us non-farmer, non slaughter-house workers) a bit much. ;)
I don't eat a lot of meat any more but I love when vegetarians and vegans claim that if we carnivores just saw what happens to the poor animals we consume we'd become vegetarians or vegans. Um, no, I've seen clips of what goes on in slaughterhouses, I'll chow down on what used to be Bessie the cow without a second thought.
Mileage will vary, of course.
As for bad treatment of animals on the sets of movies, if you watch a lot of B-movie westerns from the 40's and 50's like I do, you'll see horses just completely wipe out doing some of the stunts, I'm pretty sure they were mercy-killed soon after.