Other K-Dramas Scenes With Horses Are Scrutinized After The Animal Abuse Controversy Of “The King Of Tears, Lee Bang Won”

KBS drama The King Of Tears, Lee Bang Won recently came into criticism when a video of their filming site went viral online. The video showed how the drama filmed a horse chase scene where the horse had fallen down. Drama staff tied wires to the horse’s legs and pulled on them to cause it to fall on purpose. This resulted in the horse lying down motionless for as far as the video can tell.

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Later on, KBS gave a statement to claim that the horse got up by itself and the team sent it back after checking that there were no external injuries. Unfortunately, the horse passed on a week after filming.

In light of the news, many other sageuk (period) dramas with similar scenes began to be scrutinized. While it is unclear how these dramas filmed the scenes exactly, viewers are beginning to call them out for animal abuse.

1. “Queen Seondeok”

In this drama from 2009, not only did the horse fall, but it took a tumble and rolled over several times.

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2. “Gyebaek”

Not one, but two to three horses were made to fall down a hill in this dangerous bombing scene.

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3. “Jeong Do Jeon”

This horse took a firm tumble and fell directly onto his chest. It hit the ground hard and its rear legs were forced up in the impact.

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4. “The Great Battle”

In this movie about a war, the horse similarly fell forwards.

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The severity of the impact can be seen in a close up. It plummets face first.

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5. “The King’s Affection”

The most recently filmed flick out of the list, apart from The King of Tears, Lee Bang Won, The King’s Affection has the horse falling down and throwing the actress of its back.

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Both the horse and the actress take a tumblr and roll on their sides.

Netizens were horrified by the state of the scenes, especially given recent news. While previously, they were not made privy to how the scenes were filmed, the viral behind-the-scenes video from The King Of Tears, Lee Bang Won truly opened their eyes to the abusive methods of filming.

• “Crazy. I guess that’s how they all died.”
• “I can’t say anything but how crazy they are…”
• “No but… For The King’s Affection, when I watched it I didn’t know but this is so shocking…”
• “I always thought it was CG. Who knew it was filmed like that”
• “I of course assumed it was CG… Why are they putting so much into a horse chase scene which doesn’t have much value?”
• “Wow crazy… All the angles are exactly the same… F*ck this is a loss of humanity.”
• “After searching it up, the horse owners actually like this because when the horses just die, they don’t need to spend money on it and actually they receive money for it.”

Hopefully through this incident, animal rights on filming sets will be reconsidered and reinforced.