I commented this further down the thread but to make it easier I'll just put it here too. Herzog really is a terrible person. He is very talented but I honestly can't get past his horrible and unusual cruelty to animals, and people, for his films. It's hard in his case to separate art from artist, because his art is where all the abuse is. He abuses animals/people for his films, so it can't be ignored unless you dont watch them. Not sure how people are ok with supporting him, he goes out of his way to be mean.

Nosfertau - The animal abuse was so bad that the handler on set quit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu_the_Vampyre#Animal_cruelty In his film Aguirre, The Wrath of God, chickens are dropped from a cliff. A horse is beaten. A horse is thrown into a river and kicked. Monkeys are rampantly abused and thrown into a river.

In Fata Morgana, a fox is carried by the throat.

In Stroszek, a chicken on a hot plate ("dancing", aka its feet are being burned) is shown.

An abandoned project called Game in the Sand had animal abuse so out of control that even Herzog himself admitted it was a bit much. https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4s9uyb/wtf_happened_with_the_rooster_in_werner_herzogs/

I mean look at all these horrible examples for his film Even Dwarves Started Small : https://violence-hurt-animals-in-film.blogspot.com/2020/08/even-dwarfs-started-small.html

I also believe that the "penguin walking away to its death" scene in his documentary Encounters at the End of the World is staged. In that he abducted a penguin and displaced it far from its colony, causing it to walk endlessly to its death because it was lost. Purely for his film.

And it is not only animals. Herzog is also cruel to the actors he puts in his films, notably the mentally disabled man Bruno S, whom he had cast in two films. Herzog admitted to torturing and tormenting this man to get him in a certain frame of mind for his films.