The shooting of dogs in Paramount’s ‘Yellowstone’ was unnecessary animal cruelty. Any television programme should never show egregious animal cruelty. Ever. And this it seems is what happened in the latest episode of Yellowstone, which according to news media includes the shooting of several Broken Rock Reservation (‘rez’) dogs.
The shooting of the dogs took place on a native Indian reservation in preparation for a visit from the President.
The dogs were shot by a military force which visited the reservation in preparation for POTUS’ arrival.
They decided to shoot them believing that they were strays (they were not). That is bad enough. You don’t shoot dogs because they are strays. It reminds me of the killing of dogs and cats before the Beijing Olympics and before the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia.
This killing of dogs rings true. It’s a kind of clean-up of the environment to make it look nicer when the President visits. It totally devalues sentient animals to zero.
One of the stars of the Yellowstone series is a Native American actor. He is a member of the Lakota Native American people. His given name is “Ta Sunke O’yuspa Un” which translates as “He Catches the Horse”. His English name is ‘Moses Brings Plenty’ (see header picture).
And in playing one of the lead roles in the series he pleads, in this episode, with the military to not shoot the dogs because he tells them that they are people’s pets, allowed to roam freely around the rez. But to no avail.
I’ve not seen this series but clearly there was no holding back on the violence against innocent animals I guess in the interests of realism.
But you simply don’t do that because it encourages animal abuse. It normalises animal cruelty and this is at the top end, in my view, of egregious animal cruelty. Totally unnecessary, wanton and callous and it should not have been filmed. It should have been removed from the script.
It tells us that the producer and script writer have a less than good relationship with animals.
I am not the only person to think that because there’s been a torrent of criticism from fans and viewers of the series.
Below are some examples:
Will Agner said: “I’ve put up with fake cowboys and fake Montana and stupid s**t on Yellowstone but I think I’m drawing the line at shooting rez dogs.”
@Starstruck3160 said: “”And all those poor rez dogs. That was gross and unnecessary.”
Meagan Jacobson Kaser posted: “Yellowstone dog scene…not it. Despite being a huge dog lover- felt weird, cheap, and unnecessary for shock value. Poor acting to go along with it. That writing was not it.”
For the sake of completeness, the character Angela Blue Thunder was behind the dog massacre. So it seems that one of the administrators of the rez was behind it. It’s irrelevant to me.
Below are some articles on abuse:
