Did they really kill the dog?

Yeah they did really kill the dog I'm afraid. I read somewhere that apparently it put up quite a fight and they had to beat it up with hammers for quite a while before it gave out its final yelp. The director insisted it was vital for the realism of the sequence though, the dog had to be freshly "dispatched". Unfortunately this was the norm in the 1960s, this was of course before they realised that doggies had feelings just like human beings.

love scenes were different in those days as well, there was an orphanage set up next to battersea dogs home for the baby's that were consummated during filming.

It's a still image.

Ask the dog to kindly lie down for a moment, drape him in foliage and take a still picture - then re-film on an optical printer or rostrum camera - no bloodshed required.

In many films they would have used a simple freeze frame - a single frame of the film refilmed multiple times on an optical printer, however I don't think that this was quite the case here.
The film was shot in Techniscope which used a smaller negative area and that means that the final image is grainier than the average film. The image of the dog is not as grainy as the rest of the film which is why I suspect that it was shot with a still camera - probably loaded with the same negative stock as the rest of the film, but using a larger negative area, because the contrast/colour of the dog shot matches the surrounding film so well.

I've actually trained my dog to play dead and she will just lay down and relax. She is so still it looks like roadkill. It wouldn't be hard to train a dog to be still and even in the 60's Hollywood would never let them kill real animals. Even the head in the sheets in the Godfather was an already dead horse bought from a glue factory.

No.
There is an old movie trick which is to get the animal to fall and lie still (they are trained to due this on cue),and play "dead". You can see this trick in old westerns when a horse falls after being " shot".If you look closley you can usually see the animal breathing ( bit of a give away). In the old days they would sedate animals (not sure if they can these days)to make it look as though they were dead.

Or
if the animal has been lieing down they film it getting up, then run the film backwards to makke it look like it is falling down.

or
they do a still frame shot of the animal lieing down or these days easier to use an animatronic model or cgi.


You usually see " no animals were harmed during the making of this movie" at the end of the credits, as the regulations are very tough regarding animal welfare in films, there are usually vets on set as well.

Actually in many cases the rules and regulations for animal welfare are far more strict and they get better treatment on movie sets than the human actors do..lol...

How could you possibly think they would have killed the dog? Sorry, but that's such a ridiculous question to ask.

Its not a ridiculous question for those who watch a lot of older films--although its more rare for a dog to be killed in a movie especially a UK film.


Cool Hand Luke has either an extremely realistic dead dog or they gave one a very strong sleeping drug.

Khartoum has some pretty disgusting examples of horse violence--horses tripped and falling on their heads, explosives detonated right under them. Ironically the director died in a car accident a few years later.


Even with the Hollywood animal oversight groups there are deaths here and there-especially horses.
The Hobbit supposedly had a few horses die just as happened on LOTR.

I watched Cry of the Banshee recently and they show a dead sheep and rabbit, but the dog looked to be a taxidermy head of some kind.



"Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal. Note his history, as sketched above. It seems plain to me that whatever he is he is not a reasoning animal. His record is the fantastic record of a maniac. I consider that the strongest count against his intelligence is the fact that with that record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal of the lot: whereas by his own standards he is the bottom one." Mark Twain