Give Viewers a Cold Slap of Reality

Killing fields in prime time.

The program aired at 9:30 p.m. Thursday on Foothill Community Access Television in Grass Valley, Calif. It aired with a detailed disclaimer warning parents that it might not be suitable for their children. And it aired without a hitch, the tiny station reported.

Good.

No demonstrations.

Good.

No angry callers.

Good.

And surprising, given how much anger had been expressed in advance about the airing of the documentary “Killing Shelter Animals: The Shame and Failure of a Community.”

Dozens of locals had protested in calls to the cable channel and the Nevada County animal shelter, which helped produce the program that showed strays--two dogs and four cats--being put to death at a pound by injection as well as inside a carbon monoxide chamber.

The needle, some gas, and next stop a walk-in fridge known as “the dead box.” The purpose of showing this, shelter workers said, was to increase pet adoptions and persuade owners to sterilize their pets.

So-called “reality” shows notwithstanding, this was reality.

And exactly what television should be pursuing, as KCET’s “Life & Times” did recently when showing a dog being euthanized by injection at a Los Angeles shelter as part of a story about some of the grim reality facing Dan Knapp, general manager of the city’s Animal Services department.

And as “60 Minutes” did last month in airing a videotape made by Jack Kevorkian showing him administering a lethal dose of drugs to a Detroit-area man with advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The man, after asking Kevorkian to end his life to spare him the agonizing death that he expected to face at the end of his terminal illness, got what he wanted.

Kevorkian also got what he said he wanted, an arrest and murder charge expected to lead to a trial that will provide him a forum for challenging Michigan’s new anti-euthanasia law.

“60 Minutes” got what it didn’t want, angry criticism from many quarters, including from TV watchdog Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who charged that airing the Kevorkian tape--which showed the man dying peacefully after being put to sleep and injected--amounted to ghoulishness.

But why? The means of death was surely unorthodox, but not, it seemed, the death itself. What do so many fear seeing in the deaths of others? A reminder of their own mortality?

How ironic that many Americans who sit mesmerized in front of their sets as bodies are stacked like lumber in such graphically violent CBS miniseries as “The Last Don” and “The Last Don II” recoil when facing on television a death that isn’t fiction. Even a nonviolent one.

What we don’t see or know about become abstractions. Hence, the Iraqi casualties of last week’s U.S. and British airstrikes are abstractions because they have been shown on TV here so rarely and fleetingly, presumably in part because of limits Saddam Hussein’s regime has placed on the movements of foreign media.

Children dying of starvation in some parts of Africa are abstractions, too, because we don’t see them much anymore.

For most of us, abortion also is an abstraction. That’s why an abortion should be videotaped with a special camera (the technology exists) and shown on TV, not as an argument pro or con, but because it’s reality that we should be aware of.

Executions are abstractions. That’s why they should be televised, too--not as an argument pro or con, but just so residents of the 38 states that allow capital punishment know what they’re endorsing.

Slaughterhouses are abstractions. We know they exist. Yet most Americans make no connection between the grotesque killing of so-called food animals and the nicely presented meat on their plates. They’ve never seen the grisly work from which they derive pleasure at the dinner table. The great documentarian Frederick Wiseman made a devastating film capturing the routine of a slaughterhouse some years ago. The sights were absolutely horrific. Someone should show it again, just so we know.

Wait just a minute, someone may be protesting. Wasn’t it you, the self-righteous, self-appointed maven of morals and ethics, who condemned Los Angeles stations for telecasting live chopper pictures of Daniel V. Jones blasting away half his head with a shotgun on a freeway overpass earlier this year? Wasn’t that also reality?

Yes, but with a major difference. That grisly scene was beamed to homes in the afternoon without warning, the gory payoff to a lengthy police pursuit that was surely as shocking to viewers as the station executives claimed it was to them.

In these other instances of stripping the thick gauze from sights we should see, viewers would be warned, through advisories, about what they would be seeing. As they were in Grass Valley on Thursday night when being reminded that when we say we’re putting animals to sleep, they won’t be waking.

What is everyone afraid of anyway, the truth?