Watership Down (film) the US box office, earning only US$3 million against a budget of $4 million. The British Board of Film Classification have been criticized for declaring Watership Down as a U rating, which is intended for anyone at least 4 years of age. The film was released to theatres in the UK before the PG rating was created in the UK, but had never been rerated after the PG rating came. The fact that the film is an animation about rabbits makes many unaware parents mistake the film for being a typical child-friendly film, arguing that the frequency of gore, death,
The Lives of Animals of Animals" appears again in Coetzee's novel "Elizabeth Costello" (2003). Coetzee's novella discusses the foundations of morality, the need of human beings to imitate one another, to want what others want, leading to violence and a parallel need to scapegoat non-humans. He appeals to an ethic of sympathy, not rationality, in our treatment of animals, to literature and the poets, not philosophy. Costello tells her audience: "Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object ... There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have