I would like to protest in the strongest possible terms the airing on your station of a weekly program entitled "Secret World." I happened to catch it last night when I couldn't sleep, thinking it was a nature program. In fact this episode showed little more than documentary footage of wild animals being killed by predators in situations that were ostensibly natural but clearly set-up by the film-makers to cause slow, painful death. The narrator, far from adding educational perspective to the events depicted, intoned the most ignorant and superstitious nonsense about the world being haunted by "evil ones" and "spirits of death" that lurk about waiting to destroy everything good and right.

In one scene a young capybara (a friendly web-footed mammal that grows to about 40 pounds and is often the pet of children in South American villages) was thrown by someone just out of camera range into a river swarming with piranhas and shown from several angles struggling desparately to reach the shore as its stomach is torn open and the surrounding water turns dark red with blood. There was a brief underwater shot that must have been gotten by sacrificing a second animal. In other scenes, small mammals are shown thrashing about as they are slowly strangled in the grip of large snakes.

This program is apparently just an excuse to air "Mondo Cane"-style graphic violence and reflects shockingly poor judgement on the part of whoever programmed it into Channel 5's lineup. And the attendant pandering to ignorance and superstition is unacceptable in a medium that should take into account the welfare of the community it serves. Broadcasting patent falsehoods cannot be defended on the grounds of offering variety to your viewers or serving the special interests of a segment of your audience. Would you air a show produced by the Ku Klux Klan that said that all blacks were criminals at heart, merely on the grounds that a part of the community actually entertained such monstrous beliefs? Would you tolerate a program produced by skin-heads that offered instruction on how to beat up foreigners, or one produced by child molesters that showed how to maximize the psychological damage inflicted?

Documentary programming can be both fascinating and educational, but showing helpless animals suffering painful deaths can not be considered entertainment any more than can clandestine footage of Iranian secret police torturing political prisoners or home videos of highway accident victims screaming in pain. Graphic violence should not be shown on television in my opinion unless 1) the film makers have done nothing to cause the tragedies they record and 2) the narration educates the viewer about the context in which the event should be understood. "Secret World" does neither. It is a sick excuse to revel in the kind of unnecessary suffering that appeals to the sort of people who like to watch pit bulls tearing weaker animals apart. By fostering the mistaken idea that cruelty is part of nature's plan, such programs might in fact be contributing to the atmosphere of violence that is undermining America's urban communities.