Was it necessary for the people behind Oro to kill a dog, for whatever purpose they

thought it would serve in fleshing out the vision of their film? That question has pretty
much consumed social media and what passes for national discourse in the last couple
of weeks, the debate spilling over from the seemingly straightforward issue of a law
having been breached to more esoteric back and forth: the supposedly burgis
revulsion by some over dog killing when it remains a practice in some parts of the
country, or the incendiary charge that people are more outraged at a dogs death than
the killing of some 6,000 Filipinos so far in the Duterte administrations war on drugs.
How has it come to this? Blamedespite their protestations to the contrarymust be
shouldered in large part by the filmmakers, specifically Oro producer Shandii
Bacolod and director Alvin Yapan, not only for green-lighting the dogs slaughter but
also, and more startlingly, for the insincere, graceless way they have handled the
controversy, which has only made matters worse for them.
When the first questions ab