Harry Potter’s Hedwig and other film animals in cruelty probe
EXCLUSIVE MIKE PARKER U.S. Editor THE company behind some of Hollywood’s most talented animals is at the centre of a cruelty investigation.
Harry Potter’s owl Hedwig and the labradors in Marley & Me are part of the Birds & Animals Unlimited stable.
It has supplied creatures for 155 movies, including The Terminator and Pirates of the Caribbean.
But America’s Department of Agriculture is investigating allegations against the California-based firm over its treatment of cats, dogs, goats, pigs, penguins and even a kangaroo.
PETA’s Lisa Lange said: “This isn’t just one potentially explainable case of mistreatment or some rogue employee we’ve found. This is how Birds & Animals Unlimited is operating.”
Its movie performers also include Fang the dog and Mrs Norris the cat from the Harry Potter films.
And all five dogs that played Marley in Jennifer Aniston’s family comedy were trained by the company’s Mark Forbes.
Birds & Animals Unlimited, which owns a five-acre ranch in Acton – an hour’s drive north of LA – faces claims it violated the federal Animal Welfare Act over the shelter, nutrition and medical treatment of its livestock.
The Department of Agriculture has a dossier of alleged abuses uncovered by activists from PETA during a four-month sting. It claims enclosures housing birds of prey – including Crash, one of the owls which played Hedwig – were not cleaned for six weeks.
A kangaroo called Lenny died after being unable to eat due to an untreated broken jaw. And three pigs were “thin to emaciated” with overgrown hooves including Miss Piggy, from College Road Trip, who had “bloody, raw lesions on her side”. Goats, dogs and cats were deprived of food for “training purposes”.
And a wolf was fed reduced amounts of food to lose 20lbs for a film. Dogs were left outside in freezing temperatures while others lived in “sub- standard kennels”. Penguins that appeared in the 1992 blockbuster Batman Returns had overgrown nails. The company claim PETA’s exposé is “misleading” and “selective in what it shows and what it omits”, but admitted it “can do better and plans to”.
But they refused to publicly address specific issues until the inquiry is completed.
Bob Ferber, a retired prosecutor from LA’s City Attorney’s Office who founded its Animal Protection Unit, said: “They’re keeping animals the way a local, poor, underfunded shelter would do it.”