Indignation over Filipino ‘dog eater’ slur in Will Ferrel film ‘Anchorman 2′

January 5, 2014

by benign0

Filipinos are apparently up in arms over yet another racial slur against them included in the movie Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (directed by Adam McKay, produced by Judd Apatow).

Anchorman 2 news reporting legend Ron Burgundy

In an Inquirer.net piece, Filipino-American journalist Emil Guillermo described his experience sitting through the film an coming across the line “Only Olympic sport Filipinos are good at is eating cats and dogs” delivered by lead character Ron Burgundy (played by Will Ferrell). “I was so irate by the line that I tried desperately to find a pen and scribble in the dark; I believe that’s the line verbatim,” writes Guillermo who says his “sensitivity levels on jokes about Filipinos are pretty high.”

Guillermo further writes…

To recycle the slur in a movie for a general audience is just plain racist, no matter how they update dog-eating by adding cats to the menu.

And they made it an Olympic sport too. The Winter Games? So that would mean dog and cat, flash frozen, not fresh?

For those who think who still think there’s no big deal, how would you like it if the only time you hear “Filipino” mentioned in global pop culture is as a punch line?

Bad enough to be generally excluded from mainstream pop culture.

Filipinos have long been known (fairly or unfairly, it’s all subject to debate) for their taste for dog meat. In the capital city of Manila, Metro Manila Commission Ordinance 82-05 specifically prohibits the killing and selling of dogs for food. More generally, the Philippine Animal Welfare Act 1998 prohibits the killing of any animal other than cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, poultry, rabbits, carabaos, horses, deer and crocodiles, with exemptions for religious, cultural, research, public safety or animal health reasons. Nevertheless, as is reported from time to time in Philippine newspapers, the eating of dog meat is not uncommon in the Philippines.

Back in 2010, we featured a short piece on a disturbing incident brought to the fore by the Animal Welfare Coalition of the Philippines which involved a series of photos posted on Facebook showing what appear to be Filipino teenagers slaughtering and roasting dogs to be used as pulutan (nibblies) for their drinking session was featured.

Filipino youths slaughtering dogs for nibblies

The Facebook album (now unavailable to the public) from which it was lifted was posted by the Animal Welfare Coalition. The caption of the album indicated that the photos were “proudly posted” by a certain Bigleng Arcilla on “November 8 [2010]” and whose friends include “Jeff Pecson, Jannella Cruz, Ar Tubaces Jr., Arian Canlas, Jhenypher Sison, Aljon Masiclat, Jerome Cabuso, Aldwin Arcilla, Darwin Delos Reyes, Emanuel Dane Sevilla, Al Mungcal, Aw Arcilla”.

Up to 300,000 dogs are reportedly killed for meat in the Philippines every year.

[NB: Parts of this article were lifted off the Wikipedia.org article "Dog meat" and used in accordance with that site's Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License consistent with the same license applied by Get Real Post to its content.]