History CarnivoreConfusion / LiveActionTV

* There was a ''Series/TalesFromTheDarkside'' episode called "Your Weight Is Over" that took this concept to the very extreme. A malevolent "diet company" gave a woman the power to hear food talking. Any food, vegetable, or animal. So whenever she bit in, it screamed. She starved to death in the end. Puzzling, in as much as fruits (and many so-called vegetables, such as tomatoes and eggplant) are not whole organisms; they are in effect fertilized ovaries, deliberately cast off by a plant in order to facilitate its reproduction.[[note]]Even if you pluck an apple from a tree instead of waiting for it to fall, you're not killing (or indeed hurting) anything. The seeds are ''designed'' to pass through an animal digestive tract unharmed and viable.[[/note]] Processed meat certainly wouldn't be able to speak, either, so both must just be a trick.

** In the ''Series/TheMuppets'' episode "Generally Inhospitable", Miss Piggy says the reason she hates being sick is that when she was growing up on the farm, injured pigs disappeared, and the next time you saw them was in the butcher's window. This is played ''absolutely straight''.

** In the Creator/JulieAndrews episode number ''The Lonely Goatherd'', one must wonder what the lonely goat herded (especially since no flock was shown on screen).
*** Well, no wonder he was lonely!

* There was a ''Series/TalesFromTheDarkside'' episode called "Your Weight Is Over" that took this concept to the very extreme. A malevolent "diet company" gave a woman the power to hear food talking. Any food, vegetable, or animal. So whenever she bit in, it screamed. She starved to death in the end.
** Puzzling, in as much as fruits (and many so-called vegetables, such as tomatoes and eggplant) are not whole organisms; they are in effect fertilized ovaries, deliberately cast off by a plant in order to facilitate its reproduction. Even if you pluck an apple from a tree instead of waiting for it to fall, you're not killing (or indeed hurting) anything. The seeds are ''designed'' to pass through an animal digestive tract unharmed and viable.
*** If you think about ''that'' too hard, especially in the context of sentient apple trees, you get a whole different kind of {{Squick}} (see ''Literature/EqualRites'').
*** Processed meat certainly wouldn't be able to speak, either, so both must just be a trick.
*** Fresh vegetables can feel "pain" much better than processed meat. Animals feel pain via nerve cells, which are dead at that point. The vegetable's equivalent damage-recognition system (which is based on hormone changes and cell membrane voltage) is fully functioning while it's fresh. Vegetables do not have central nervous systems to process the sensation, so the point is moot unless you have an aversion to damaging food in general.

* Possibly the most disturbing (and, yes, Nightmare Fuel) variation of this trope: ''TV Funhouse''. The whole show is a satire of kid's shows. Except for one human, most of the cast are animals. Some of the animals are played by puppets, others by actual animals. In one episode, all the animals went to this restaurant where the whole gimmick was that you eat what you are. The cats can eat cats, lobsters eat lobsters, and so on. Get ready for this, because I'm leading up to the disturbing part, which will be the very last three words of this entry. Remember, some of the animals were played by puppets, and others were played by real animals. And the theme of the restaurant was that you eat your own species. Well, they had a real life pig, and real food, and they showed the pig eating bacon.
** Pigs are omnivorous and happily eat anything. It's not disturbing that they fed a pig bacon, as non-sapient creatures have no morals to have qualms with cannibalism, anymore than the rest of the scene is disturbing.
** And among livestock, pigs are infamous for cannibalism, especially eating their own young. Many other animals do this as well[[note]]even animals that are normally herbivores, such as rabbits[[/note]], particularly when under stress from overpopulation or malnutrition.
*** So you know that bit at the beginning of ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'' where Dorothy falls into the pigpen and everyone panics? The reason for that is because it's fairly common for pigs to eat their keepers if given the opportunity. A pig eating bacon is barely a squick.
** Also, in case you weren't aware of this, there are plenty of animal farms that feed suet (leftover bonemeal and unedible or unwanted animal parts) back to the animals. In some countries this is illegal or at least restricted (e.g. feed cow suet to the pigs, pig suet to the cows, or somesuch). The main reason to avoid this (like cannibalism, aside from the moral implications) is that same-species feeding makes it easier to contract diseases from the food; most notably Prion Disease, aka "Mad Cow Disease". The EU has adopted regulations prohibiting or strictly regulating certain types of animal products from animal feed for this reason.

* {{Discussed}} in a ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'' cold open when Jerry and Elaine [[SeinfeldianConversation dissect a movie concession stand bumper featuring animated candy]].

-->'''Jerry:''' The box of Raisinets runs up to the concession stand, buys another box of Raisinets.

* {{Discussed}} in a ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'' cold open when Jerry and Elaine talk about a movie concession stand bumper featuring animated candy.
-->'''Jerry:''' I just don't understand the Raisinets. [...] The box of Raisinets runs up to the concession stand, buys another box of Raisinets.

-->'''Elaine:''' He's not gonna ''eat'' them. He's buyin' 'em for his Pepsi girlfriend.

*** If you think about ''that'' too hard, especially in the context of sentient apple trees, you get a whole different kind of {{Squick}} (see ''Discworld/EqualRites'').

* One sketch on ''TheYoungOnes'' had a couple of rat puppets chatting in the background. Spotting them, and apparently not understanding their language, Rick smacks one with Neil's guitar, killing it. A quick scene of the surviving rat ''eating'' the dead one follows, in which it Hand Waves this trope, remarking: "It's what he would have wanted".

** Its spinoff, ''Walking With Beasts'' is also guilty of this; the "Sabre Tooth" episode of the former paints the terror birds as carrion-eaters (their actual diets were made almost entirely of live prey) to make the sabre-tooth cats more likeable. This is not only biased but also completely incorrect, as terror birds are very poor scavengers and superb predators.

* Played very straight in the Dutch children's show ''[=BiBaBoerderij=]'' (can be translated to [=FiFaFarm=]), which teaches small children about various aspects of farm life. In this show, everything that is edible also displays sentience, including the vegetables and fruit,and live in an idyllic setting in which everyone gets along just fine. And yet, the characters frequently eat food onscreen, which includes products made from the very animals and vegetables that are also portrayed as sentient characters. Off course, with this series being aimed at small children, this is never addressed.

** ''Walking With Dinosaurs'' of all things, has a tendency to do the "[[ScavengersAreScum evil scavenger]]" variant of this trope; while the predatory animals do have a more ominous mood to their presence, they're still depicted in a way that makes them at least somewhat admirable and interesting creatures. The same cannot be said about ''Coelophysis'' (opportunistic protagonist predator from "New Blood"), ''Eustreptospondylus'' (the token land-lubber in "Cruel Sea"), young ''Ornithocheirus'' (scavenges the dead protagonist in "Giant of the Skies") or ''Didelphodon'' (an annoying, hyena-like mammal from "Death of a Dynasty"), all of which are depicted in a rather negative, or at least macabre light.

* In a rather silly example, AnimalPlanet's ''Weird, True and Freaky'' featured [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuhXKvxz4-U a story on chimpanzee "cannibalism."]] Anyone familiar with chimps knows that the males tend to kidnap and eat the infants of rival troops. Shocking, yes, but that's ''not'' what the story is about. It's about chimpanzees, apes, hunting for monkey meat. And the narrator says it's cannibalism. That's as cannibalistic as a polar bear eating a seal!
* ''Series/WalkingWithDinosaurs'', of all things, has a tendency to do the "evil scavenger" variant of this trope; while the predatory animals do have a more ominous mood to their presence, they're still depicted in a way that makes them at least somewhat admirable and interesting creatures. The same cannot be said about ''Coelophysis'' (opportunistic protagonist predator from "New Blood"), ''Eustreptospondylus'' (the token land-lubber in "Cruel Sea"), young ''Ornithocheirus'' (scavenges the dead protagonist in "Giant of the Skies") or ''Didelphodon'' (an annoying, hyena-like mammal from "Death of a Dynasty"), all of which are depicted in a rather negative, or at least macabre light.

** In the ''Series/TheMuppets'' episode "Generally Inhospitable", Miss Piggy says the reason she hates being sick is that when she was growing up on the farm, injured pigs disappeared, and the next time you saw them was in the butcher's window. This is played ''absolutely sraight''.

* In ''{{Dinosaurs}}'', everyone ([[FurryConfusion except, ironically, humans]]) acts like people, which means the characters will frequently have conversations with their meals.

* ''Series/WalkingWithDinosaurs'', of all things, has a tendency to do the "evil scavenger" variant of this trope; while the predatory animals do have a more ominous mood to their presence, they're still depicted in a way that makes them at least somewhat admirable and interesting creatures. The same cannot be said about ''Coelophysis'' (opportunistic predator from "New Blood"), ''Eustreptospondylus'' (the token land-lubber in "Cruel Sea"), young ''Ornithocheirus'' (scavenges the dead protagonist in "Giant of the Skies") or ''Didelphodon'' (an annoying, hyena-like mammal from "Death of a Dynasty"), all of which are depicted in a rather negative, or at least macabre light.

** Its spinoff, ''Walking With Beasts'' is also guilty of this; the "Sabre Tooth" episode of the former paints the terror birds as carrion-eaters (their actual diets were much more varied) to make the sabre-tooth cats more likeable.

* In a rather silly example, AnimalPlanet's ''Weird, True and Freaky'' featured [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuhXKvxz4-U a story on chimpanzee "cannibalism."]] Anyone familiar with chimps knows that the males tend to kidnap and eat the infants of rival troops. Shocking, yes, but that's ''not'' what the story is about. It's about chimpanzees, apes, hunting for monkey meat. And the narrator says it's cannibalism. That's as cannibalistic as a polar bear eating a seal! It also reaches UnfortunateImplications, as many people in Africa regularly eat bushmeat (see the real life examples below)