Blog 2 — The Animal

▶ BCM310 Emerging Issues in Media & Communication

Image taken from qz.com

I’m sure as kids we all have had pets before, whether it was a dog, a hamster or even just a family aquarium and while growing up with them I’m certain you’ve tried to ‘communicate’ with your pets before — sometimes you even felt like they could understand you and ‘talk’ back to you. Well animals ‘communicating’ like humans isn’t as uncommon as you would think, a lot of movies were created to depict anthropomorphism in animals as well as create a sort of unrealistic adaptation to how animals act in front of the human species.

Movies like Madagascar, Happy Feet and Over the Hedge portray an alternate reality in the eyes of the animals. An example would be in Happy Feet where the main character that is the penguin ‘Mumble,’ is shown in a enclosure with multiple other penguins that don’t ‘speak’ like a human while Mumble does; and when he does in front of humans — in the human’s eyes or in this case what they hear, is just a penguin making noises at them — when in reality Mumble is speaking as a normal human being would (Leane, E., & Pfeenningwerth, S., 2013). That makes you really think whether animals really are speaking out to us, is that dog just barking at you or are they trying to tell you something?

Image taken from pinterest.com

In other cases we as humans can or have the ability to domesticate animals, training them to understand certain commands through certain gestures, words or sounds — sometimes even rewarding them with a special treat or gift after they accomplish the ability to understand what we are trying to teach them.

Blackfish is the perfect example for how humans domesticate animals but for the pleasure for other humans. To put it shortly, it’s the story of an orca called Tilikum (Tilly) who ‘lashed’ out and ultimately killed his trainer. Theories go as far as ‘he is just an animal, and that’s what animals do,’ while some who are defending Tilly — more or less animal rights activists — say that he did it in spite because of the way he was treated.

SeaWorld is the infamous place where a lot of animals are ‘heavily’ domesticated, but also the place where a lot of cases animal abuse occurs. Though the trainers of these animals treat their partners (their animal counterpart) quite well, there is always a darker and hidden part to the story. Majority of the animals from SeaWorld are all taken from their homes out in the big blue, and most of them are young and/or babies taken away from their mothers — you can basically say that they were ‘kidnapped’. But they’re animals, they don’t speak the language that we speak; how would we know… right?

A scene in the Blackfish documentary showed a baby orca being carried away in a net while it was making noises at their mother that was right below them, with their mother making the same noises back. If you saw that same scenario happening but to human child and their mother; would that change something?

References:

1. Leane, E., & Pfeenningwerth, S. (2013). Marching on Thin Ice: The Politics of Penguin Films. Retrieved from https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile.php/2197044/mod_resource/content/2/marchingonthinice.pdf
2. Zimmermann, T. (2016, August 25). First Person: How Far Will the Blackfish Effect Go? Retrieved May 31, 2020, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140113-blackfish-seaworld-killer-whale-orcas/