DreamWorks Pictures announced on Tuesday, December 13 that War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg, has earned American Humane Association’s highest certification rating: Monitored: Outstanding, No Animals Were Harmed. The production complied with American Humane Association’s “Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media” to ensure the safety of the horses and fully cooperated with American Humane Association’s Film and TV Unit, which logged 1,100 hours on War Horse sets in England and California and safeguarded more than 100 horses. Since 1940, American Humane Association has been safeguarding animals in film. On the War Horse production sets, American Humane Association representative Barbara Carr was present to make sure that the many horses used in the making of the film were both safe and treated humanely.
AHA Film & TV Unit Communications Coordinator Lisa Yassa, Academy Award Winning Director Steven Spielberg, and AHA Certified Animal Safety Representative Barbara Carr on location for War Horse. Photo courtesy of American Humane Association.
Says Director Spielberg, “I gave Barbara [Carr] the complete, final cut so to speak, to pull the plug if she felt any of the horses were not up to the challenge or any of the horses were in any way in harm’s way.” Spielberg gave Carr input on set in the planning of the stunt or the action the horse had to perform and also gave her opportunities to watch rehearsals in slow motion, done one step at a time, so she could determine whether it would be safe for the horse. The film, which opens in theatres in the U.S. on December 25th, is an epic tale of loyalty, hope and tenacity set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during the First World War. War Horse begins with the remarkable friendship between a horse named Joey and a young man called Albert, who tames and trains him. When they are forcefully parted, the film follows the extraordinary journey of the horse as he moves through the war, until the story reaches its emotional climax in the heart of “No Man’s Land”. The First World War is experienced through the journey of this horse—an odyssey of joy and sorrow, passionate friendship and high adventure. Directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures’ War Horse stars Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Peter Mullan, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irvine, Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Kebbell. It is produced by Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, and executive producers are Frank Marshall and Revel Guest. The screenplay was written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis and is based on the book by Michael Morpurgo and the international hit stage play by Nick Stafford, originally produced by the National Theatre of Great Britain and directed by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliot. –end press release War Horse News Note: In 1916, the U.S. Secretary of War invited American Humane Association to undertake the work of doing for Army animals what the American Red Cross was doing for soldiers. Thus, American Humane Association created American Red Star Animal Relief to aid horses and mules on the World War I battlefront. War Horse News will tell you more about that in an upcoming blog post.
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All content © 2011 Fran Jurga and EquiSearch
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[...] Jurga says on her War Horse News blog that the AHA gave “War Horse” its highest level of [...]
Thank you, Fran. I just added a link to this post in my own compilation post trying to talk nervous horse lovers into the theater.
I’ve even told people, face2face – “The horses are all actors, so when they get up after the cameras stop, the horses all get treats.” =:o Even though I later read that Horse Master Bobby Lovgren doesn’t use treats. Oopsie.
Whatever it takes to get people and their tissues in the seats.
1100 Hours…. so how much money did AHA make?
Good question, Mark! I think movie producers have to charge it off to “cost of doing business” if they’re going to have animals in their films!
I think that all movie makers that have animals in their movies should be made to have the Humane Society or equivalent watching the making to safeguard the animals, but I have heard that there are loopholes in the Humane Society’s “No animals were harmed in the making of this movie” statement because it’s only the MAKING of the movie. This may not apply to the training methods. This where “Water for Elephants” fell foul to animal rights campaigners. Although the Humane Society made sure that no elephants were harmed in the MAKING of the movie, there were concerns that the elephants had been trained using cruel methods.