The organization is now under fire:

A Husky dog was punched repeatedly in its diaphragm on Disney’s 2006 Antarctic sledding movie Eight Below, starring Paul Walker, and a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey–Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch. In 2003, the American Humane Association chose not to publicly speak of the dozens of dead fish and squid that washed up on shore over four days during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Crew members had taken no precautions to protect marine life when they set off special-effects explosions in the ocean, according to the AHA rep on set. And the list goes on … All of these productions had AHA monitors on set.

An AHA employee describes as the organization’s 99.98 percent safety rating record as “a total B.S. number made up for PR purposes.” Nora Caplan-Bricker parses the expose:

[The Hollywood Reporter] lays [the] filmmaking fatalities at the feet of the American Humane Association, the non-profit that hands out the “No Animals Were Harmed” designation that is such a staple of TV and movie credits, building a portrait of an organization that is far too cozy with Hollywood to effectively police it. The regulator is actually on the movie industry’s payroll: AHA’s Film & TV Unit subsists largely on a multi-million dollar grant from the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and it’s currently working on a “fee-for-service” plan, under which producers will pay AHA to monitor sets starting as early as January. In other words, this litany of Hollywood’s furry casualties is a familiar parable of what happens when a powerful entity regulates itself.