YMMV / Animal Planet Heroes

• Audience-Alienating Premise: While the show has won several awards throughout its multiple incarnations, good luck trying to ask non-fans to give it a watch. Pet and animal lovers that Animal Planet caters to would have to watch innocent pets with third-degree cases of Body Horror, along with potentially dying, courtesy from the moral bottom of mankind, with a fair chance that said animal abuser will get off scot-free, leaving that demographic emotionally-burning out quicker than a pre-Edison light bulb. Meanwhile, True Crime fans can get bored of watching what could be considered to be the same cases over and over again, just moved to a new city and with different animals.
• Bile Fascination: Most of the compilation episodes of the "most shocking" cases, since they're all the very worse cases of neglect and abuse, are this.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Bound to happen in a show with cute baby animals.
  • Moreso since the show is about RESCUING the aforementioned animals.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Between the wounds on the rescued animals to the state of some of their environments, especially those in hoarding situations, you really don't want to watch this while eating.
  • One of the worst was probably (spoilered for massive Squick) a Cocker spaniel who had been kept in his own filth so long without grooming that his fur was matted to the point that it made up more than half his mass and was pulling on his skin, and as they were shaving off the massive amounts of fur they found a maggot living inside one of the mats and even the Houston SPCA officers said they'd never seen anything like it. It's enough to make one want to take a shower forever.
  • If you think that's bad, one time three dogs were found in a tiny yard, and one of them had maggots swarming all over its wounds (inflicted by one of the other dogs). Then one of the Pennsylvania SPCA vets slices open one of the dog's legs while cleaning the wounds to get a better look of the situation and finds more inside. The dog was so literally half-dead that the maggots were eating it alive. Unsurprisingly this discovery made the vet decide that the dog had suffered enough and he was put to sleep.
  • Dogs that had been living in their (too-small) crates for so long, that the fecal matter had solidified at the bottom like a sort of thick flooring. One of the officers tried to put ruler though the feces and couldn't push hard enough. She had to drill down into it to get an accurate measurement—there was more than an inch of solid fecal matter in the bottom of every cage.
  • A puppy in an abandoned yard was picked up. As the rescuer held it out for the camera with its belly exposed, all of the fat fleas and other bugs raced for cover in its fur. The puppy eventually succumbed to disease and blood loss.
  • One Philadelphia case had a cat that was surrendered to the ASPCA that turned out to have a massive hole in its neck.
  • A Scottish RSPCA officer found an injured sheep on the side of the road with maggots eating it alive on its rear quarters. This is one of the few instances where you see an SPCA officer putting the poor animal out of its misery on screen.
  • A Houston case involved two elderly twin sisters who had 144 cats living with them. The house's living conditions were deplorable: the main rooms of the house had at least two feet of solid fecal matter and other refuse on the floor. As if that wasn't enough, the garage had four feet of fecal matter and refuse on the floor, and the cats were burrowing through it!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The titular incident of the Philadelphia episode "Machete Attack". A couple is out with their large dog. They are assaulted. The man holding the leash runs, not noticing his companion is not with him. The dog gets loose, having noticed that the woman is still being assaulted, and goes back to help her. The dog is hit in the head with a machete leaving wounds that shocked the vets and needed over 80 stitches. Thankfully the dog lived, but the couple were constantly threatened by their attackers and almost didn't press charges because of fear of retaliation. The woman even admitted they had stopped using their front door out of terror.
  • Some of the gator moments in Miami get very nerve-wracking.
  • Nightmare mixed with Tear Jerker—a fighting dog was once taken in and seemed perfectly fine towards people. However, when they put him in the kennel and he scented out other dogs, he tried to chew through the wall and had left a massive hole by the time people got there. The dog had to be euthanized.
• Tear Jerker: Here
• Ugly Cute: Well, you can't expect neglected and abused animals to look perfect after what they've gone through:
  • Disco, a kitten who turned out to have a rare blood circulation disorder that caused its ears and tail to die off (once again, don't watch this show while eating). But it may have just made it more adorable.
  • Dogs who have the skin condition mange tend to lose their fur and have nasty scars from scratching, but they just look so poorly and miserable that you want to hug them... even if it wouldn't be a good idea.
  • Was once a plot point with the Chinese Crested breed. A neighbor called in stating that several dogs were nearly hairless and looked like they had bad skin. Turns out she was calling in a woman who owns only Chinese Crested dogs, who are naturally hairless except on their feet and head and are generally Ugly Cute animals. The cop was happy to report that the dogs were all A-okay.

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