Imagine if a film crew, without your permission, stormed into your home and filmed you in your most private moments. Makers of wildlife documentaries do just that to non-human animals, and are denying these animals their right to privacy, according to new research published in the current issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
(Tortoises mating. Zoos might also deny animals their right to privacy, since they force animals to do in public what they might otherwise do in private. Wikimedia Commons image)
Animals obviously cannot sign release forms, but Brett Mills from the University of East Anglia still argues that animals have a right to privacy, which he acknowledges is a challenge for production teams.
“The aim of (my) research is to encourage debate, especially within the contemporary environmental context where it is now commonplace for us to question the impact of human movement and behavior around the globe,” explained Mills, a senior lecturer in the School of Film and Television Studies. “In addition, though, perhaps there is an argument for some species, in some circumstances, not to be filmed. At the moment it seems that such arguments are never put forward.”
He added, “This is an important debate for two reasons. Firstly, wildlife documentaries are usually seen as important pieces of public service broadcasting, and it's therefore worth us thinking about the ethical contexts within which such productions exist. Secondly, such documentaries are the key way in which many people 'encounter' a range of species from all over the globe, and so they therefore contribute to how we think about other species and human/animal interactions. By exploring what wildlife documentaries do, and how they do it, I hope to contribute to environmental debates at a time when the global effects of human behavior are rightly under scrutiny.”
For our own species, we generally make a distinction between what is public and private, although paparazzi often cross the line. Nevertheless, we can still take legal action or speak out against violations. At the heart of this argument is: Do animals even have a right to privacy?
Dr Mills said, “It might at first seem odd to claim that animals might have a right to privacy. Privacy, as it is commonly understood, is a culturally human concept. The key idea is to think about animals in terms of the public/private distinction. We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they often do engage in forms of behavior which suggest they'd rather not encounter humans, and we might want to think about equating this with a desire for privacy."
(Japanese macaques. This species was featured in the Discovery Channel documentary series "Life." Wikimedia Commons image.)
“When confronted with such ‘secretive’ behavior the response of the wildlife documentary is to read it as a challenge to be overcome with the technologies of television. The question constantly posed by wildlife documentaries is how animals should be filmed: they never ask whether animals should be filmed at all.”
He mentions that a justification could be made for filming animals as they roam plains and deserts and engage in hunting activities because these are ‘public’ events, which take place in locations that include many other animals, and in which the animal being filmed makes no explicit attempt to not be seen.
Yet animal activities which might equate with human notions of the private are treated in a way which suggests the public/private distinction does not hold, he believes. Mills said many species could be read as desiring not to be seen. Animals in burrows and nests, for example, have constructed a living space that equates with the human concept of the home, and commonly do this in locations that are, by their very nature, explicitly hidden, often for practical purposes.
“Human notions of privacy which rest on ideas of location or activity are ignored in terms of animals," said Mills. "It doesn’t matter what an animal does, or where it does it, it will be deemed fair game for the documentary."
In addition to the filmmakers and the animals, there are two other groups involved in the matter. First, there are the broadcasters, which must decide whether or not to run the footage. Those decisions are often guided by regulations and are based on what the second group- the public- wants to see and deems to be acceptable.
“While never made explicit, such regulations assume that such ethics are applicable to humans only,” said Mills. “The ethical standards applying to wildlife programs are predominately predicated on ensuring that ‘audiences should never be deceived or misled by what they see or hear,' that is the ‘contract with the viewer’ is prioritized over the rights of the animals. In doing so, an assumption is made here about the differences between humans and animals, which have been at the heart of debates over animal rights and the ethical treatment of animals for millennia."
“The environmental and educational aspects of wildlife documentaries are assumed to trump ethical concerns about animals’ privacy. It is an impressive piece of ethical manipulation, whereby privacy, so enshrined within the concepts of rights for humans, becomes merely a ‘realm’ which documentary makers can enter, justifying their actions as ones for the benefit of the very species whose rights are being moralized away.”
Tags: Animal Behavior, Animals, Crime, Law and Justice, Human Behavior, Humans,
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