The Grey Anti-Wolf Movie has Angered Animal Rights Activists

Feb 5, 2012
Marc Latham

Wolves are Just Wild Dogs - Marc Latham

Liam Neeson boasting about eating wolf to prepare for The Grey has led to PETA calling for a boycott. The demonic wolf plot had already caused controversy.

The Grey is currently the number one movie in the USA. The film stars Liam Neeson as Ottway, a wolf-hunter who has to try and survive a ravenous wolf-pack after his plane crashes in Alaska. Animal conservationists like Defenders of Wildlife, have been trying to protect wolves in Alaska from mass aerial slaughter for decades, so it is ironic the film's plot reverses the real roles, and has humans trying to survive wolves.

PETA Calls for Boycott of The Grey

Animal welfare groups such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) have been further angered by Neeson's publicity seeking boast that the cast ate wolf meat to get into character. Sharon Churcher reports in The Daily Mail that PETA have now called for a boycott of the movie ("Method eating? Liam Neeson movie faces boycott after actor admits he ate WOLF STEW to prepare for latest role," February 5th, 2012).

This may of course backfire on PETA, leading to more people taking sides and supporting the movie and its storyline. It will certainly give it more publicity.

The reverse effect could also help wolves of course, with more people seeking information about the original dog, and respecting an animal that struggles against the odds to survive, rather than wanting to hate and hunt them.

The Jaws Effect on Sharks

While most movies are beneficial to animals, the harm negative movies can do is epitomised by how Jaws legitimised and popularised shark-hunting.

In the Livescience website article, "How 'Jaws' Forever Changed Our View of Great White Sharks" (20th June, 2010,) Charles Q. Choi wrote, 'The film's key mistake was portraying great white sharks as vengeful predators that could remember specific human beings and go after them to settle a grudge.' This led to dozens of shark fishing tournaments popping up, as people thought they were doing their community a service.

Choi quotes George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research in Gainesville, as stating: 'This proved to be part of a growing shark-hunting trend that dramatically reduced nearly all shark species over the following decades. In the waters off the U.S. eastern seaboard, populations of many species of sharks have dropped by 50 percent and some have fallen by as much as 90 percent.'

Will The Grey Hurt Real Wolves

The truth of the human relationship with sharks, wolves and nearly all other animals is of course that humanity has killed millions more of them than the other way around. Wolves are extinct in many regions of the world, including the United Kingdom.

Wolves were close to extinction in the United States of America until progressive thinking brought them back to many regions in the 1990s, including the famous Yellowstone reintroduction. The program has been a great success, but there is still a lot of opposition to sustaining a viable wolf population.

A wolf looking for a mate made an epic journey into California recently; becoming the first wild wolf in that state for nearly a century. That surely deserves a movie more than the regurgitation of the wolf as demonic monster in The Grey.

Wolves gave us our 'best friends' in dogs, yet they are still cast as our biggest enemies in fable and fiction.