Now that the facts are clearer, I thought it would be timely and helpful to weigh in on the controversy over the slaughter of a dog in one of the scenes in “Oro,” one of the entries in the recently concluded Metro Manila Film Festival. I feel strongly about the movie because it had the right message and was powerfully made and acted. But the decision of the filmmakers to film and, regardless of the actual circumstances of the killing, show the actual slaughter of a dog, was wrong. It should not happen again.
Alvin Yapan, the director of “Oro,” said that he used a real animal as it “was within the bounds of culture in that area where dogs are eaten as food.” He also emphasized that no one from his production team, including the film’s cast, participated in the slaughter. The official story, stated belatedly, is that there was a wake and the Oro crew opportunistically took footage of a slaughter that was going to happen. This is however contradicted by a whistleblower, an actor in the film if I recall properly, who claims that two dogs were actually killed (one accidentally) and specifically for the film. From what I could gather, the whistleblower’s story does not seem to be a first hand account and could be considered hearsay.
The Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), represented by an articulate and passionate Anna Cabrera, rightly and strongly protested this act of animal cruelty, eventually filing a case for violation of Republic Act No. 10631 or the Animal Welfare Act. The controversy also prompted the withdrawal by the MMFF executive committee of the Fernando Poe Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence it earlier granted to “Oro.”
It is unfortunate that, in the early days of the controversy, the defenders of Oro juxtaposed the killing of the dogs with the massacre of the small-scale miners—the subject matter of the movie. They lamented that there was a lot of distress about the dogs but not about the human beings killed.
Others also weighed in to complain that there were more protests against the killings of the dogs compared to the protests against the extrajudicial killings in the war against illegal drugs.
These comparisons were uncalled for. First, it is not true that people were more outraged by what was done to the dogs than to the miners. The reason why I found Oro a very powerful movie was precisely because it got it right with respect to social and environmental injustice in the country. Most people I personally know who protested against the killing of the dogs are certainly against the massacre of the miners and sympathize with the victims of the drugs war.
More importantly, the argument of the Oro defenders incorrectly dichotomized human rights and animal rights.
Animal rights, protection, and welfare are concepts that are centuries old and universally recognized. It is the idea that animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives and the need to avoid suffering. Advocates maintain that animals should not be view solely as food, clothing, entertainment and beasts of burden but must be accorded humane treatment. While there exist extremist views on the concept, a compromise approach has gained currency in that animals may be used as resources so long as they do not unnecessarily suffer; they have some moral standing but not in the same genre as human beings who are considered superior species.
As early as the 1820s, the United States has already enacted anti-cruelty statutes. In 1860s, the first Humane Societies and Societies for the Protection of Animals were formed to run animal shelters and promote the enforcement of animal cruelty laws. The movement grew still in the 1970s with the publication of the influential book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, authored by Peter Singer, considered the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Animal Liberation argues that interests of all beings capable of suffering are worthy of equal consideration and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color.
Singer argues that animal rights should be founded on the idea that animals also have the capacity to feel pain rather on their intelligence. He accuses speciesism (the notion that human beings, being naturally superior, are not morally restricted to exploit animals) of being similar to racism and sexism, in that they all deny moral and legal rights to one group in favor of another. Today animal welfare and protection are deeply entrenched practices not only in the United States but in the West as well. Highly publicized campaigns against animal cruelty and testing have been launched and have succeeded in many places and against many products (eg. clothes and fashion accessories) and processes (including medical and pharmaceutical testing).
The Philippines is, however, a newcomer in animal protection and welfare campaign. Under Republic Act No. 8485, the Animal Welfare Act of the Philippines of 1998, it became the policy of the state to “protect and promote the welfare of all animals in the Philippines by supervising end regulating the establishment and operations of all facilities utilized for breeding, maintaining, keeping, treating or training of all animals either as objects of trade or as household pets.”
RA 8485 provides that persons hurting animals will be imprisoned for 6 months to two years and fined for P2,000 to P5,000. These penalties are quite light and is one reason practices that engender animal cruelty persist, such as the dog meat trade, dog fighting and racing, or “tambucho” killing and euthanasia and other forms of animal cruelty. Aside from the benign penalty imposed by the law, the problem lies in enforcement and a more sustained and effective education campaign on pet ownership, pet handling and safety, overpopulation and endangered species and in general more humane treatment of animals.
The campaign becomes more challenging when animal cruelty is deeply ingrained in the culture of some ethnic and rural communities in the Philippines. As an indigenous peoples’ rights advocate, I am fully conscious that there are cultural differences among peoples on how to relate to particular animals. A balanced approach is required in such cases and we need to allow for a pluralistic approach while recognizing emergent universal norms. Thus, under Philippine law, the killing of dogs, as part of ritual or ethnic custom, are actually allowed but they should be coordinated with the Bureau of Animal Industry and the Committee on Animal Welfare.
The way we treat nonhumans is reflective of our capacity to treat our fellow human beings. None of this however is to deny that human and animal rights are of very different orders. Yet human rights is all about a good and civilized society, to the extent then that we can live in one where we can at least accord animals a modest, if appropriately refashioned, set of rights, devoid of barbarity towards these non-humans which prove to be so beneficial to human beings in a wide variety of ways.
Oro is right about the injustice done to the miners. Its filmmakers are wrong about the slaughter of the dog/s. We must always uphold human rights and animal rights together.
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