| This dissertation asserts that the "No Animals Were Harmed" disclaimer in film and television productions reveals the utopian visions of a humane and civilized society. The institutionalization of disclaimer by the American Humane Association is situated within a rhetorical and cultural history of the 20th-century U.S. film industry and humane movement using rhetorical analysis and archival research. Efforts by the American Humane Association (AHA) to protect the rights of the animal actor, a omnipresent figure in film history, reveal the existence of an intimate public sphere. The first chapter demonstrates how public opinion after the death of a horse during Jesse James (1939) enabled the AHA to become part of the Production Code. The second chapter examines why the industry failed to follow humane standards for animal actors in bullfighting films of the 1950s and 60s. The third chapter contends that Heaven's Gate (1980) catastrophe linked public emotion with the film industry's economic and moral failings, thus relegitimizing the AHA's Film & TV Unit. The fourth chapter argues that the new field of animal/ity studies would benefit from examining its pedagogic goals, particularly in connection with the ethic of care tradition and feminist composition studies. |
