A time comes when those animals that haven’t died before reaching adulthood are no longer economically viable or they are just too dangerous. At that point they are dispensed with and their lives become even more miserable, if that is possible.
In 2011 Tato Peralta from the company Fauna and Acción stated in the article Animals worthy of an Oscar in the El Mundo newspaper, “When they are no longer useful they start warning you little by little… One day you go away on holiday and when you come back nobody can even get inside the cage”. In another article, A chimpanzee may earn up to 15,000 per day of filming, Tato Peralta said, “In simple terms, it is common for a wild animal to stop doing what you want it to do from a certain point in time, even though you have raised it yourself. A tiger knows it is a tiger”.
On reaching sexual maturity and their maximum strength, their instincts and their size make them potentially more dangerous and even aggressive. Keeping animals is an expensive business so it is usually necessary to find them a way out. In most cases they are sold to zoos or other centres of captivity but may be used by the same owners for breeding.
The “useful” life of many of these wild animals used in the audiovisual sector is actually limited to just a few years. Chimpanzees, for example, have a useful “artistic” life of about 8 years, but the may live up to 60 years.
Animals that have been used to make large companies and multinationals more attractive have ended their days shut up in small cages for years. Only in the best case scenarios have they been rescued by foundations, sanctuaries and private rescue centres. But there are very few of them and they have limited resources and limited capacity.
At the state level
Among the successful initiatives we highlight: