A Dog’s Purpose Under Fire for Animal Cruelty Allegations After German Shepherd Forced into River

by | Jan 18, 2017

From Amblin Entertainment and director Lasse Hallström, comes the feel-good movie about a pet’s reincarnation called ‘A Dog’s Purpose’. Starring Dennis Quaid, Josh Gad, Britt Robertson, Peggy Lipton and Juliet Rylance, the film opens theatrically January 27, 2017.

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“A Dog’s Purpose” shares the soulful and surprising story of one devoted dog who finds the meaning of his own existence through the lives of the humans he teaches to laugh and love.


Thanks to TMZ, we have a behind-the-scenes video of a trainer forcing a German Shepherd into a man-made river (using a swimming pool) in order to shoot a scene for the upcoming ‘A Dog’s Purpose’. In the clip, the trainer tries aggressively to push the frightened animal into the extreme water, then as the clip ends we see the dog completely submerged and drowning as crew and divers rush to rescue the animal while someone can be heard yelling, “Cut it!”.

The incident took place in November, 2015 while filming was taking place in Winnipeg, Canada. The director was present during the scene and TMZ is reporting that at lease one crew member who was there was extremely disturbed by the ordeal. Amblin and Universal are investigating the incident right now – you can read more about that over at TMZ – here.

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Now – I didn’t want to see this movie anyway, but this is the cherry on top of the whole stupid project which looks as though it was built on the sappiest of premises to begin with and should have been spawned on the Hallmark Channel. Now if only they had the balls to just leave this whole sequence in, with someone throwing the dog into the water like they did on Mr. Nanny back in the day. Straight up no shits given – we’re gonna roll film and release the whole damn intro as is. Watch that below if you haven’t seen it. Amazing.