With regard to the films thing..
The Jean Luc Godard film Week End has an early extended tracking shot of a traffic jam in which everyone is dead. It just keeps going and the length of the shot and sheer number of dead bodies caused a number of people to start laughing. Later in the film you see a pig being slaughtered and many people walked out at that point. Now obviously the people were acting and the pig wasn't, but I don't think that that was the only reason why people left. I think we are more sensitive to the suffering of animals.

Though, of course it's also possible that they'd reached the point of thinking "Right, I've had enough of this pretentious shit."
(Cave Duck, Fri 23 Jul 2010, 12:58, Reply)