Musings on Sacred Cows

Sacred Cows



I'll admit it, I have bad taste in movies. At least once a week I find myself in a conversation where someone is talking about some terrible movie, and I find myself thinking, "hey, I liked that...a lot."
Some of my favorite films were huge commercial flops. Titan A.E. - loved it. Treasure Planet - can't get enough. Battlefield Earth (yes, THAT one) love it.
My bad taste is not limited to just movies, either. Take candy, for example. My wife loves high-quality-pure-imported-from-some-place-I-can't-pronounce chocolate, while I like those mostly-wax and ground-up Chinese newspaper Easter peanut butter eggs with no expiration date. My favorite stuff are those nasty vending machine cookies with the pink frosting. You know, the ones that don't contain any actual food content.
Yum.
Anyway, so I was watching one of my favorite bad movies, Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman. I love that movie because it is a vampire movie that contains actual vampires. Not high-school students who go to prom, control their blood-lust, sparkle in the sun, and have abusive dysfunctional relationships.
No, when I look at the vampires in Van Helsing, I think to myself, "THIS is what vampires should be like."
In one scene the winged brides are laying waste to a town, snatching poor hapless humans right off the ground and tearing their throats out. At one point, one of the brides (cause vampires are polygamous) pounces at Van Helsing, only to have him roll out of the way at the last second. The bride instead grabs a CG cow by mistake and crashes into a building with it. In the commentary track the director mentioned that during one of the test screenings the audience was really concerned about that cow. They wanted to know that it had survived the attack, and not knowing was really bothersome to them.
So, about a hundred thousand dollars of Hollywood money (not sure what that would be in real-life money, look up Hollywood accounting for a tasty read) was spent adding in a short clip at the end of the scene where the CG cow emerges from the rubble unharmed.
That quite frankly amazed me. Here we just watched about three dozen humans get violently murdered by nightmarish creatures, and we didn't bat a collective eyelash, but the minute a CG cow got manhandled suddenly everyone's sympathy meter goes haywire.
In writing this is called a sacred cow. It does not have to be an actual cow, by the way, that is just me trying to be clever by using an example that actually involved a cow. A sacred cow is anything that the audience holds so dear that you basically cannot touch it without inciting a revolt.
Now, many educated western people think themselves above having superstitions and sacred totems, but they are dead wrong. In fact, western audiences have more sacred cows than cultures that actually have real sacred cows do.
A huge one for western audiences is animals. Particularly cute ones. You can mistreat humans all you want, but mistreat an animal and be prepared to be drowned in letters. It sometimes makes me wonder about the kind of people we are when throwing a human off a building makes people stand up and cheer (see the end of Die Hard) but if you were to accidentally step on a puppy's paw and make it yelp thousands of people would go start cutting down trees to make the posters and signs they need to protest your work. (Can't people protest without wasting so much paper? It seems like at some point everyone agreed that to be counted as a real protest a certain amount of litter must be created)
Anyway, as sacred cows go, animals have managed to land themselves into the same category as babies in many people's minds. If you don't believe me, the next time you are around a cat person, I dare you to admit that you hate cats. Odds are they will look at you like you just said you hate babies, then punched one right in front of them just to complete the effect. Personally, I hate the fact that I have to pretend to like cats in mixed company. They are filthy disgusting creatures that spitefully treat their owners as if they were their royal subjects.
At least dogs can be taught to do useful things, and exhibit a degree of loyalty towards their owners, so I can kind of understand why people have them. But cats do nothing for you and care nothing for you.
Anyway, I rarely admit this in mixed company, but this is the Internet, and everyone is cool here, so I feel I can totally admit this here without fear of reprisal. Feel free to send any hate mail to StephanieMeyer@yahoo.com
Now, keep in mind, I have never had a cat, and I have never mistreated one, nor do I wish harm to come to them. In my whole lifetime, the amount of cat suffering I have generated is zero. Yet, that isn't enough for some people. The mere fact that I do not like cats makes me a detestable human being, a pariah, in their eyes. One of "them," not one of "us."
What makes me scratch my head about all of this is because this particular sacred cow seems to be unique to city dwellers. (i.e. people who have almost no experience with animals.)
Now, I respect people who love animals, but there is a HUUUGE difference between loving animals and understanding them, and when emotion is not backed up by experience and knowledge it can create problems.
Deer, for example, are viscous, mean, territorial, dangerous animals that kill more humans every year then bears have killed in the last hundred years. And I don't mean like someone hit a deer with their car and ran off the road, I mean deer go out and run people through who happen to stray into their territory.
I know, right? Little Bambi. When explaining this, I once had a woman respond, "How could a deer kill someone?" I responded by saying, "Are you kidding? They have knives on their heads!"
This love for animals coupled with a lack of experience with animals has created a category of critters that most people think are cute, but are actually really really dangerous and should be avoided. Swans, for example, will charge you and hit you with their powerful wings, which are strong enough to snap your arms and spine. And not just because they are defending their babies, they'll do it just to ruin your day. Dolphins kill ten times as many people each year as sharks do. And yes, occasionally dolphins will save someone, but that is rare, they are far more likely to try and forcibly mate with you. Yes, dolphin rape is a real thing and happens every year. I wish I was making that up.
Anyway, the point is, you cannot simply love nature, you must also respect it, and understand it. Life is not a Disney Cartoon. Critters do not sing, and they do not want to be your friend. Mother Nature is a brutal world of kill-or-be-killed, and those critters exist in that world.
Whether you are fighting off vampires or dolphins, the message is the same: Be smart, be safe. And remember, knowing is half the battle.