Animal Cruelty on TV Show

Pigs are food!

What do they want a primitive lethal Injection?

Australia what a loony bin!

Much to my shame, yes, we watched Survivor, including the episode in question.

If the editing of the show is to be believed, Michael Skupin (the guy who left the show with seriously burned hands later in the series) cornered a wild pig and tackled and killed it with a knife. If I recall correctly, there was also some question about whether the producer, Mark Burnett, released the wild pig near the contestants' camp, particularly at a time when they were running out of food and subsisting on rice and water.

At least on the basis of what was shown (and editing can make black seem white and up seem down), it doesn't look like there was cruelty - it was depicted as a quick kill. Of course, if it took him five minutes to repeatedly stab the pig, or maimed it and chased it around for an hour, well that wouldn't make very good television, would it? The RSPCA might have a case but without seeing the unedited tape it's impossible to say one way or the other.

-Duncan

Wild pigs are an introduced species in Australia. They are destroying the natural habitat of native animals by digging up the soft ground and killing the vegetation.

Capturing the wild pigs and selling them overseas as meat is a cottage industry among the farmers and ranchers of Australia, so I don't see why the RSPCA is having such a snit over someone on a TV show killing one for food. Maybe because he was American? I've seen Steve Irwin capturing pigs on The Crocodile Hunter several times and never heard a peep from them.

I want to know when the Royal Society for the Prevention of the Abuse of Intelligent Viewers will chime in and get the idiots who thought up all these shows removed from the gene pool.

Beyond that, I don't really care.

I don't watch the show, so I haven't seen the episode. But this reminds me of the stink PETA tried to make over the scene in the first series where the cast ate rats. It doesn't matter if the pig was "released" or wandered in; it was food and it was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Nature isn't always pretty - an uncomfortable fact that the show may be reminding folks.