I'm an animal fan and ...
Question: I'm an animal fan and wondered about a scene in the miniseries Into the West in which a herd of buffalo go over a cliff. Did the filmmakers really drive animals off a cliff and, if not, how did they make it look real? Isn't there a law to keep animals from being harmed while making movies?
Answer: As far as laws go, there's the multipart federal Animal Welfare Act (you can read it all at www.nal.usda.gov/awic/legislat/awicregs.htm), and there are lots of state-level laws pertaining to cruel treatments of pets, livestock, and lab, circus and zoo animals. At the state level there are various laws pertaining to animal cruelty as well. But when it comes to the way animals are treated in movies, the American Humane Association's Film and Television Unit (http://www.ahafilm.org) is the front line. The AHA monitors the treatment of animals in U.S.-made films and television programs and awards the "No animals were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer; its involvement in film production was prompted by abuses during the shooting of the 1939 film Jesse James. The organization opened its Los Angeles office in 1940 and was given authority to monitor animal action in films by the Hayes Office, which oversaw filmmaking standards and practices. The Hayes Office is notorious for its role in the history of American film censorship, but credit where credit is due: Under its auspices, the lot of animals in movies was greatly improved. The AHA lost official jurisdiction when the Hayes Office was disbanded in 1966, but scandalous reports of animal mistreatment on the set of Heaven's Gate (1980) gave it new leverage to advocate for animals. Since 1980, field representatives of the AHA's Film and Television unit must be allowed to supervise any film or TV production made under the provisions of the Screen Actors Guild/Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Certified Agreement that uses animals. They also formulated a full set of guidelines for filmmakers (if you're interested, you can get them from the website), and have some 25 field representatives on call to monitor productions. All that said, the AHA only had representatives on set for the Into the West miniseries in New Mexico, and then only for some sequences, which is why the disclaimer simply says that they monitored parts of the production, not that no animals were harmed. The buffalo stampede was shot in Canada, and the AHA was told that CGI effects were used for the sequence but weren't given any details. I just rewatched the stampede, and I have two thoughts: One is that clearly those two child actors were not in the same physical space as the falling buffalo. The other is that the falling buffalo have the air of insubstantiality that I associate with completely computer-generated animals. So my guess is that a team of visual-effects artists, using footage of real buffalo as a template for weight, texture and muscle movement, built a bunch of virtual buffalo and sent them over a virtual cliff.
