winged migration

[Guest guest]

Hi, just thought I'd add another comment about Winged Migration...

after watching the bonus feature about the making of the movie on the

DVD, the hunting scenes aren't the only disturbing things about it.

What seems like amazing feats in nature documentary were achieved

through a lot of manipulation of the animals. The filmmakers raised

these birds and imprinted them to get them to fly along with them and

then crated them up and shipped them around the world to the locations

to get the dramatic shots they wanted. After watching the process, I

felt somewhat disgusted with the movie. There's nothing natural about

it.

 

Once the amazement of what they've captured is stripped away, there's

little reason to support such a project. Since it's done and out

there, hopefully it really does get viewers to think more about birds,

but they're certainly not teaching ethical treatment by example.

Perhaps it deserves accolades on a cinematographic front, but Winged

Migration does not impress with its behind-the-scenes handling of its

subject matter.

 

-yvonne

[Guest guest]

My husband and I bought the DVD and watched part of it. As birdwatchers, we

were

pretty disappointed with it. And I was very disturbed by the hunting scenes.

Until I

remembered that all of the geese, ducks, etc. have been hand-raised, habituated

to

humans, and trained by the film crew, who trained them to follow the crew

throughout

the movie and where to go, etc. You don't actually see any of the birds get hit

and fall -

they do it as a sort of montage which makes be believe that it is just pretend

to show

what happens. If they let their birds get shot, they wouldn't have them for the

rest of the

movie. Unless those were wild birds and they were just filming in the hunting

area. In

which case, although it is disturbing, they are trying to show everything that

happens to

birds as they migrate, which includes hunting.

 

There is also the scene where the red-breasted goose gets caught in the oil in

the

Eastern European refinery and is left by the rest of the flock. Again, those

are trained

birds, and I can't believe they'd just leave it there.

 

That being said, we didn't even finish the movie - which we felt was talked up

much

more than it really was. I hadn't realized that everything was totally trained

and mapped

out. And I have some issues with raising birds just for that purpose.

 

Emily