On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM (Gravitas).

THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM
My kitten is bigger than yours… but I love him just as much.
By Cynthia Kane

Statistics tell us right away in the opening of THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM that the U.S. is home to over 15,000 exotic animals – as pets. That’s right - most of these wild animals are not living in zoos: lions, tigers and bears… oh my! And chimpanzees and cobras and pythons and alligators and vipers and cougars and elephants and well, you name it.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM is the story of these animals, these so-called pets and those who love them unequivocally, but sometimes, and sometimes is the all-too important word here, don’t really know how to care for them.

It’s a controversial subculture in our society, raising dangerous animals as common household pets. Unregulated – for example, your lion doesn’t need a license unlike your, say, corgi -, not quite illegal, but dangerous and sometimes deadly.

Director Michael Webber travels across the United States meeting these ‘pet owners’, allowing them to tell their stories, encountering their animals, traveling with hidden cameras to the under-the-radar trade fairs that sell these creatures, and following state and local officials who have to catch the runaways, those that get loose in the neighborhood or say, for example, an overpopulation of Burmese pythons run amuck in the Everglades.

The heart of Webber’s doc takes place in the Midwest. Here we meet Tim Harrison, Executive Director of Outreach for Animals whose job as a public safety officer is to protect both the exotic animals and people. After having served as a police officer, firefighter, and paramedic in Oakwood, near Dayton, Ohio, he has often been called to rescue wild and dangerous animals in suburban settings and has been consulted for his expertise on the national as well as state level.

“You don’t have to go to India to see a tiger or to Africa to see a lion”, he shrugs.

“You can go to any town, USA.”