By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

What effect do the media have on animals? A great deal. For years we saw Indian films which talked rubbish about snakes taking revenge and chasing snake killers. How many snakes must have been killed. It was normal to see chickens carried upside down and fights taking place in chicken coops or songs about chickens being born to be killed (the latest being the one in Aamir Khan’s Three Idiots) – it led to the general feeling that chicken lives had no meaning. Thakur Sahibs who flaunted their bravery always had animal heads hanging on their walls, encouraging other “brave” people to go hunting. Heroines cooing to pigeons led to these wild birds being caged and sold.

The worst effect on public trends was the Vodafone ads. I don’t know if they sold their products but lakhs of miniature pugs were smuggled into the country. Since this is an extremely vulnerable dog whose heart beats erratically, eyes fall out, cannot breathe properly and cannot have babies except by caesarean operation, thousands have died terrible deaths and now our shelters are full of abandoned pugs.

The same thing happened with Dalmatians after 101 Dalmatians. These large awkward semi deaf dogs were bought by people who could not exercise them and they were soon sent to animal shelters. Beverley Hills Chihuahuas resulted in a temporary passion for these tiny fragile dogs. Movies make people buy dogs featured in films. Researchers analysed 87 movies that featured pooches and correlated those findings with data from the American Kennel Club. They discovered that films can increase the popularity of the dog’s breed for up to 10 years. The 1943 hit Lassie Come Home, a movie about a collie led to a 40% increase in collies. The Shaggy Dog, a 1959 movie with an Old English sheepdog as its star, doubled its sales. There are more than seven movies featuring dogs each year and those that became fashionable following their movie debuts are overbred to meet the demand and through inbreeding have developed the greatest number of inherited disorders. Jack Russell terriers like Frasier’s “Eddie” and St. Bernards like “Beethoven,” now flood animal shelters.

Disney’s animated films have also had an unfortunate impact. The demand for Clownfish and the Regal Blue Tang shot up after the Disney cartoon film Finding Nemo and this led to their plunder from the coral reefs of Southeast Asia. The fallout has been unfortunate: Clownfish are now severely endangered. Regal blue tang live in the coral reefs of Indonesia and the Philippines and feed on algae. They are now near extinction and the algae now cover the coral which has led to them dying of strangulation.  As the coral dies, the frequent cyclones on the coast bring the ocean waters in and thousands of people lose their homes and lives.

Harry Potter’s films have created a large demand for owls – most of whom are taken as baby owlets from their nests and die young. The owl species is extremely endangered. The pattern of individuals taking on an animal, as a result of media influence, has been seen time and again in the illegal exotic pet trade. Monkeys used as pets in the hit television series Friends let to an American demand for monkeys- specially the ring-tailed lemur - as Christmas presents and these were all smuggled in from other countries only to be abandoned when the new owners realized that monkeys cannot be tamed and bite – or died young. This species is near extinction now.

In June 2010, the BBC reported that the Compare the Meerkat adverts had resulted in a surge of imported meerkats and investigation into sales trends in 2011 showed this to be true. As soon as people realised that they were unsuitable as pets they were killed, dumped in shelters or abandoned in the countryside. Not only does this risk the life of the individual animal, which is unlikely to have the skills to survive alone in an unnatural environment, but it poses a serious threat to the environment itself if the animal is able to cope with its new surroundings. Look what has happened in India to the emus and rabbits.

This has happened to many animals such as meerkats, sloths, and slow lorises which have risen in popularity due to TV shows and Youtube viral videos featuring them as pets. Recently we caught a smuggler at the Delhi airport who had two slow loris’s stuffed into his socks. He was bound for the Middle East. The popularity of these Asian primates took off when someone uploaded a video of their pet loris getting its under arms tickled. Loris’s are stolen from the wild, their teeth painfully yanked out, and shipped to other countries.

In the 1990s came the craze of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Again lakhs of terrapins and turtles were snuggled all over the globe and 90% died. In the UK, so many were released by bored children into the wild that they damaged local flora and fauna. So serious was the effect on the environment, that an expensive project was established in 2002 to capture and relocate the terrapins to Italy.

Stuart Little led to a craze for white mice. When people realized that these were not toys, dolls or even very responsive pets, they were thrown out. The same thing happened to squirrels after Elvin and the Chipmunks. Many fell prey to cats and predatory birds. Others increased the number of rodents in the country. Rango, a less successful film, nevertheless caused an upsurge in people who wanted to keep chameleons and these were then imported from hot countries only to be abandoned soon after. Fortunately pandas are only found in China and are already so few and so large, otherwise Kungfu Panda would have destroyed their species totally. Toyshops have picked up the slack by selling stuffed pandas.

An ad for luggage which used orangutans and Catherine Zeta Jones has led to poachers descending on Indonesia and Malaysia to supply this “cute” red monkey to buyers in the West. Hundreds of Capuchin monkeys were subjected to physical and mental torture after a capuchin acted in Disney’s George of the Jungle, We Bought a Zoo, Night at the Museum and as a drug-dealing monkey in The Hangover II.  People bought them in from their native habitat and locked them up in cages till they wasted away. Wildlife researchers believe that the number of capuchins being kept privately in the U.K. is 1,200, and this figure is thought to have climbed since 2009. Joey, a capuchin monkey, was rescued after it was found abandoned in a flat in London, where it had been kept in a tiny cage for nine years.

A recent study has shown that the use of great apes in the media has a negative effect on the general public’s understanding of their conservation status. Findings show that people were less likely to believe an animal was endangered in the wild if it was represented in the media alongside people as an “actor”. Few people believe that chimpanzees are endangered species because of their frequent appearance on TV and movies. In a survey of people over 35% of those who saw commercials with chimpanzees thought that people should have the right to own them as pets.

The animated film on penguins Happy Feet has made zoos all over the world want to import penguins. The terrible zoo in Mumbai is also getting them – they will last a few days before the hot weather kills them.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws has led to the death of thousands of sharks. They have been systematically hunted down by a public that saw the movie and believe that it is a vicious predator, or commercial hunters who have taken advantage of the public hatred for the creature . The Great White shark is now officially endangered.

So many animated films set out to have animals with environmental messages. But does it really help animals ? Bambi did not save the deer from being hunted nor Babe, the baby pig from being eaten. Do they drive children and adults to think about conservation? The “exposure effect”, according to psychologists, says that people like things better by becoming more familiar with them. But familiarity through normal entertainment films and advertisement has a downside. Finding Nemo was about the illegal capture of reef fish for an aquarium display but it resulted in more fish being brought into the aquarium trade. Similar trends were seen for green iguanas following the release of Jurassic Park.

In fact, from all the evidence, it is seen that mere exposure is not enough. Even films that set out to do good like Finding Nemo, do not spark positive changes in behaviour. Familiarity on the other hand seems to increase demand.

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