This probably has been discussed to death somewhere else, but were animals actually killed in the filming of this movie? The part where the lambs are speared looks pretty realistic to me. Also does Jet Li really kill the dog? From the producers/directors point of view, it would seem such a waste to train the dog to chase Jet Li for the one scene only to have it strangled later on. I did enjoy the film but these scenes were a bit upsetting.
shareI would really like to know this too. It just came out like a bolt from the blue, totally unexpected. The lamb slaughter looked particularly realistic when one of them was being strangled, you could see and hear it in complete distress as it was being choked to death. It was actually really traumatising to watch.
As for the dog, unsure on this too. Did they bother to train it to play dead? Aren't they a delicacy in China?
Because we hear a lot about poor animal welfare and abuses in China with very little legal protection, and as this was particularly made for a Chinese audience way back with filming starting in the late 70's into the early 80's, I am somewhat half convinced that all the animal killing is unfortunately genuine.
It's definitely a question which needs answering.
When Jet Li's character checks the dog and sees that it's "dead" you can see the dog's nose twitching, which proves that it wasn't actually dead. Now I'm not sure what they did to it to get it to lay still like that, so that's another issue that needs addressing. And when the rope was around its neck they were being rather rough by pulling on it pretty hard which wasn't cool.
Those lambs though? All that looked totally real, it was brutal and disgusting. Especially if that guy really was squishing that lamb's neck, just horrifying to see.
Chinese movies are notorious for their animal cruelty.
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