In entertainment, there’s an old adage that you never involve a dog unless you are okay being upstaged by it. It’s the same reason why the easiest way to establish a villain in a story is to have that character harm a dog. “Man’s Best Friend” isn’t just a marketing tagline; it’s a truism for anybody who’s ever owned a pooch. We project a lot of ourselves onto our dogs, but there really is a deep symbiosis between us and them that we share with very few other animals. So it makes sense that “A Dog’s Purpose,” a book about a dog reincarnated several times and its reflections on its different lives with different people, might be successful enough to make into a movie. And it makes sense that when you make a movie about dogs, you’re going to have a lot of dog actors. And when you have a lot of animal actors, you need to make sure they’re all taken care of properly.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite appear to have been the case with the movie adaptation of “A Dog’s Purpose,” scheduled for wide release on Friday, Jan. 27. Just a few days before, media outlet/gossipmonger TMZ published video that appeared to show one of the canine actors in the movie being forced into churning water to simulate a scene where a police dog jumps into a raging river. The dog clearly doesn’t want to go in, but the handler forces it to go in before pulling it out again, all while you can clearly hear other people in the set saying that the dog should just be thrown. A second bit of video shows the same dog, in a different shot, swimming in the water, but it goes under briefly, causing on-site divers to scramble and get it out. The upshot of the video is that the production of “A Dog’s Purpose” mistreated its canine actors. But it might not be as clear-cut as that. And the conclusions to draw might be a lot different than the ones we reflexively jump to upon seeing the video.
