Bad publisity for Animal Planet

I couldn't read the second page of that article (it got covered by some anti-legislation pop-up so I just closed it) but on the first page this paragraph sums up Animal Planet completely:
With three seasons under its belt, Call of the Wildman is part of Animal Planet's ongoing shift away from educational programming to reality TV. "We're not looking to be a natural history channel," Animal Planet group president Marjorie Kaplan told the New York Times in 2008. "We're looking to be an entertainment destination." The network recently aired two documentary-style programs purporting to present evidence that mermaids are real.
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Natural history T.V. and related genres about animals such as this one, have always been about entertainment and the illusion of the T.V. screen, and have little to do with the animals themselves. In situations like the one described here, the animals must be available for the various 'retakes' necessary to get the desired quality of film product. So of course the situations are manufactured and not just simple filming of one event.

Even with 'serious' wildlife documentaries, many sequences are artificially created by using tame animals, or feature film of animals taken out of context or at different times to the way they occurred. That's just the 'nature of the beast'.;
 
But it came out that raccoons weren't harmed, despite being under avoidable risk.

Let's imagine another situation - a treatment of somewhat endangered animal is being filmed for documentary (non-staged).
So should the specific parasites of this animal be protected? Their conservation status is the same as that of their host :)
 
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