Animals die every day in abundance. There are hundreds of different reasons that such a thing might happen to one of God’s precious creatures, but getting a job on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey probably didn’t seem like it’d end in death for the 27 animals who were killed making the movie.
After being moved into their stables during production, many of the unsuspecting creatures came to meet their end when they were “kept at a nearby farm filled with bluffs, sinkholes and other death traps.” That’s according to four wranglers, anyway, who have lodged complaints against Peter Jackson and his company for their apparent mistreatment of the deceased.
Jackson’s company agreed that yes, some animals were killed, though many of them died of natural causes. This, of course, immediately sounds highly suspicious purely because the words “died of natural causes” have been used and c’mon, when does that ever turn out to be true? What we do hope is that one disc of the bonus features on the An Unexpected Journey DVD will chronicle this incident in its entirety, presumably getting to the bottom of the case and exposing the crazed murderer amongst Jackson’s crew. There might be a murderer, see.
Amongst the dead were Rainbow, a miniature horse who fell off a bank, broke his back and had to be euthanized, which doesn’t sound like natural causes to us at all. And then there were also a group of chickens who found themselves up against a pack of dogs, only to be mauled and killed moments later. What can be assured is that, should Jackson get away with this attack unscathed, the producers of HBO’s Luck will be calling him for advice any moment. The thought in your mind right this second, though, probably concerns whether or not 27 animal deaths was a fair enough sacrifice given that, hey, it means we get to have The Hobbit as an actual moving film. And we absolutely won’t comment on that. Now off you go. Shame on you… trying to get us to say things like that.
Source: Yahoo! News