This HAS to go viral. This pathetic movie is abusing animals in order to film cheap scenes for human entertainment. The dog is clearly terrified but the “trainers” have no regard for her safety.
Please share and encourage your friends not to spend money on a movie that uses animal abuse to film!!!
http://www.tmz.com/2017/01/18/a-dogs-purpose-german-shepherd-abuse-video/
Hi yes, ACTUAL dog trainer and dog behaviorist here. Sorry to interrupt your pitchforks and torches fest but this article is extremely misleading and is presented as a shock factor rather then presenting an actual, studied opinion of the video.
If you watch the clip, which I did, there is a lot of subtle stuff going on. First of all, rushing water is scary to ANY sort of animal, let alone a German Shepard who isn’t really a water dog like a Lab. You can see how the trainer is constantly touching the dog gently on the side and loin. He is reassuring the animal while keeping a snug grip on the collar. (Which is a flat collar btw so it can’t really do any damage to the dog even with him holding it) He is also down on the animals level, not hovering above the dog. And if you look closely, you can see that this man is constantly talking to the dog, obviously reassuring the animal. Furthermore, this is a movie dog, they have dealt with all sorts of scary situations before. This is probably the very first time that this animal was introduced to this situation and I bet you money that if we saw more of the clip, you would see them repeat this process slowly and gently until the animal relaxed.
Finally, you see the animal try to pull away. Again, perfectly normal for an animal that is scared, but again, you see the trainer pull the dog back (not yank it sharply back or drag it back) and then place the dog in the water. The actual time in the water is extremely brief and you can see that the trainer doesn’t let go of the dog and immediately pulls the animal out again after a few seconds. Just like putting a child in the bath tub for a little bit, the trainer is establishing that the water won’t harm the dog and kept the training session brief. Convenient that the clip stops before it shows you the trainer rewarding the animal in some way, which I can guarantee you they did.
Finally, I will leave you with two things. One, if the dog was actually being abused it would be responding by trying to snap at the person holding the collar and the body language would be pure terror with the tail language and hackles. German Shepards are not scared to tell you when they don’t want to do something and this dog is no different. Two, there are so many laws and regulations in place to stop the abuse of animals in movies. There is ALWAYS a representative of these organizations on site during filming whenever there is any sort of animal involved.
Don’t spread misinformation and misunderstanding please. Just like your mom forced you to eat your veggies when you were young, sometimes working with animals means encouraging them to go into situations that is way outside their instincts.
Well that situation quickly reversed itself.