Then we d trim it down, and Carol would polish it over. And I always listen to her. In any case, I wanted to do a show on animal emotions because I ve always had dogs and cats, and I ve always seen emotion in them. Yet I was told that as a filmmaker I couldn t talk about emotion in animals because it was anthropomorphizing. It s a scientific crime to attribute emotions to animals.
Buyers didn t want to tell that story.
Somehow, this was not satisfying my animal emotions. Then my co-producer, Mark Hoover, said he had new research that gave us the science we needed to tell a deeper story. After reading some 27 books, he proposed that we tell the story of how emotions evolved as the key tool of survival. We took it to the Discovery Channel, and we had to go back a few times to prove that our science was bulletproof, but then they really got behind the project. If you don t have pictures of them with farm animals, it s tougher.