Warning: Contains Footage Of Animal Cruelty
A Chinese theme park has been slammed for its flabbergasting way of promoting a new attraction: making a live pig do a bungee jump.
In the disturbing footage uploaded to Weibo – China’s Twitter-esque social media service – the animal is flung from a 70-metre-high (230ft) platform, squealing through the whole fall.
The 75kg pig was reportedly hauled to the top of the structure by four men, before being tied up in a harness and thrown off. People online have rightfully condemned the organisers – but they say it’s ‘just a bit of entertainment’.
You can see the video below (warning: it contains footage some may find distressing):
As per the South China Morning Post, the stunt was allegedly envisioned to promote the opening of the newest attraction at the Mexin Wine Town theme park in southwest China’s Chongqing municipality. As the pig screams, people can be heard laughing and cheering from the platform. When the pig is brought back up and untied, it appears to be unconscious from the ordeal.
Commenting on the controversy, PETA Asia’s Vice President of International Campaigns Jason Baker told UNILAD:
This is cruelty to animals at its worst. A bungee jump is a scary experience even for consenting humans – just imagine the outright terror of being forcibly strung up by your legs and thrown from a high platform. That’s the treatment that this pig received, all for a cheap laugh. Well, guess what? No one’s laughing.
Pigs experience pain and fear, just as we do, and this kind of disgusting PR stunt should be illegal. The theme park deserves every shred of the backlash it’s receiving online, and the Chinese public’s angry response should be a wake-up call to China’s policymakers that they must implement animal protection laws immediately.
Few viewers were amused online. One user wrote: ‘I don’t see anything funny in it. Why were there people laughing? Just because the animal can’t express fear doesn’t mean it is not afraid.’
Another person suggested the theme park’s owner should take the plunge, writing: ‘To tie up its boss and throw him down would be much more entertaining.’
While there has been an increasing social movement for more comprehensive animal rights legislation across the country, there are no nationwide laws prohibiting mistreatment and abuse of animals in China, which unfortunately serves to enable horrific acts of cruelty such as this.
However, while complaints poured in about the video online, calling it ‘disgusting’ and ‘not funny at all’, the owner of the park reportedly defended the decision, saying: ‘We let the pig make the first jump because pork prices have been very high this year and recently they dropped a bit.’
A public relations officer for the park also said the abuse was ‘just a bit of entertainment’, and the animal was on its way to be slaughtered for a Lunar New Year banquet anyway, so it was ‘normal’ for it to experience shock. January 25 will also mark the end of the Chinese zodiac’s Year of the Pig, moving on to the Year of the Rat.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.