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Originally Posted by Oro13
I totally understand.
It’s hard to get past that stuff, but so many movies did it before the AHA became a thing.
Films like Stagecoach, Ben-Hur, First Blood, and Cimino’s infamous borefest of a flop Heaven’s Gate, all sport scenes and multiple allegations of animal cruelty or death. Hell, the award winning Apocolypse Now features a scene of a water buffalo being hacked to death with a machete on camera. Even modern films are still guilty of it, but they are just more careful about what they show.
Point is, while I certainly don’t enjoy, seek out, or advocate it, it’s something that has happened in a lot of movies and, though despicable and unnecessary in the extreme, it won’t stop me from viewing a flick just because it contains it. But I do completely understand not wanting to see it so blatantly displayed ( I just skip past those scenes in subsequent viewings, never need to see them again ). Though if you or anyone else are curious about the film ( or any others in the genre like Ferox, etc ) there do exist cuts of them that remove the scenes of animal cruelty entirely. Just food for thought.
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When you mention horses being injured in Ben-hur and such, I think many would make the distinction between displaying real animals being killed for the film, as opposed to horses falling down. For one, most people don't want to see the former, whether it's fake or not. And two, they don't want to financially endorse it either.
Some people may seek out a play where, in one part, a character's girlfriend/boyfriend breaksup with them, but they don't want to literally see it happen to a real person (some Jerry Springer fans did). There's a strong distinction between theatrical drama and reality. Most people aren't seeing Ben-hur to watch horses be tripped by wires. Rather they are assuming the film-makers aren't really harming the horses. When they found out the truth, they were against it.
To be fair to Cannibal Holocaust (1980), from what I read, all the of animals are eaten by real natives -- that is, in the story narrative, with one exception, the real animals are being killed for food, they aren't being tortured. The one exception is a pig being shot by a character 'because he's going crazy', not because he intends to eat the pig. And I think this is a distinct infraction. Instead of employing (I assume) a non-precise shot, it wouldn't have been difficult to use film craft or special effects there.