‘Dog ’s Purpose’ author: I stand behind my film
The call from TMZ was brutally abrupt. “We have video showing the dog on A Dog’s Purpose being thrown in the water and nearly drowning. Comment?”
And with that, I became part of today’s quick-to-judge, hateful, ALL CAPS SCREAMING culture, firmly in the cross-hairs of a fringe group seeking to ban animals from filmed entertainment.
A quick back story to explain how I arrived at this moment. I wrote the two-book A Dog’s Pur
pose series as a love song to the relationship between humans and animals. For the film, I selected Gavin Polone as producer because he is a known animal activist — he would never allow anything bad to happen to any animal while he was on set.
But he wasn’t on set that day. And so the dog, Hercules, was mishandled. For nearly a minute, the trainer tried to convince Hercules to stand on a platform just under the surface of the water, but Hercules wouldn’t do it. He was trained to enter the pool from the other side. The handler should have given up the moment Hercules said no.
What you don’t see in the edited video is that after he was dipped in the water, Hercules was allowed to jump in from the correct side, and did so with joy. Hewas never thrown in the water. He did go under for four upsetting seconds later that day. A scuba driver and a trainer were in the pool with him and several others were also there to protect him. After he surfaced, he was seen wagging and unperturbed.
Then I made what I suppose a public relations expert would call a mistake: I went on social media and defended the movie’s values.
You can’t imagine how horrible it is when people scream invective at you because you refuse to say a dog was “traumatized” (he went into the pool so willingly a short time later) and “harmed for life” (I’ve seen that Hercules is happy and healthy). The death threats against me and my children, the berserk rage, calls for boycotting my work — the toll they take is on sleep, on peace and, worse, on my perception of humanity.
I’m a forgiving person and I believe that the lesson we can learn from this is that even more strict monitoring needs to be in place. All of my dog books are adoring poems to the souls of these gentle creatures. I co-wrote what many are calling the most pro-rescue film Hollywood has ever produced. Despite being called a sellout and a torturer, I stand behind the movie and the message.
Best-selling author W. Bruce Cameron co-wrote the script of A Dog’s Purpose, the new film based on his book of the same name.