Animal Tragic

20/06/2003 09:13 AM
TVNZ

There are people out there who want to undergo the most extreme plastic surgery in their bid to turn parts of their bodies into animal features.

This is plastic surgery at its most radical and scary.

There is the Lizard Man who has made his tongue into a fork...the Devil Man who has had horns grafted on to his head...and now there is Cat Man.

Animal Tragic includes interviews with the surgeons who perform this radical surgery and asks complex ethical questions around whether cosmetic surgeons should actually perform procedures requested by an apparently sane patient. Wednesday June 25 at 9.35pm on TV One.

Dennis Smith is tattooed from head to toe with orange and black stripes and his teeth have been filed to needle point. He also has latex whiskers implanted and surgery to his lips so he has a permanent snarl. And get this - now he wants a surgeon to graft tiger fur on to his skin, like a permanent wig. By day he is a computer programmer earning $80,000 a year...but by night he is Cat Man and has also changed his name by deed poll.

All these men are at the tip of the iceberg - the underground movement of people who want to undergo radical surgery to make themselves look like animals. Radical surgery is rife not only in America, but it's huge in Argentina, also extraordinarily, in Dublin and it's happening in London.

Animal Tragic talks to one of the most controversial plastic surgeons in the world, Doctor Joseph Rosen.

Doctor Rosen is not a quack but a well-respected surgeon from across the Atlantic who is working on plastic surgery techniques designed to make humans resemble animals.

Doctor Rosen says, "Why do we only value the average? Why are plastic surgeons dedicated only to restoring our current notions of the conventional, as opposed to letting people explore, if they want, the possibilities?"

Established surgical techniques can be used to stretch torso fat and re -jig rib bones to create a wing. Rosen has developed blueprints for such an operation. He has also been working on cochlear implants to enhance human hearing, (something the US military is exploring). He is even developing tails.

But who the hell would want wings, super-ears or a tail? Well, people do: Jim Rose, the head of Gross Out Travel Circus or 'Freak Circus' knows people who do. One member of his group has horns made from coral. There are also people who have had their tongues split like those of lizards.

Animal Tragic has spoken to Dr Rose, and he says the man to carry out this type of plastic surgery is Steve Hayworth. He can outrageously alter your body. According to Rose, this type of plastic surgery is rife in the States and in South America.

But this film will also explore the complex ethical questions around whether cosmetic surgeons should actually perform procedures requested by an apparently sane patient. In a recent case, a woman from New York sued her plastic surgeon for malpractice, because he had failed to recognize that she had a severe obsession with her body image. If problems like this arise with relatively normal people, what might happen with the radical procedures proposed by Rosen?

Worldwide, there are roughly 2 million plastic surgery operations every day, many of them apparently quite frivolous - yet only fifty years ago face lifts were seen as monstrous and unnatural. So who's to say radical plastic surgery won't become the norm in the future, and that thousands of us may not choose to walk round with horns, lizard's tongues and eventually wings and tails?

Check it out on Animal Tragic.

Animal Tragic
Wednesday 25 June at 9.35pm on TV One